Common

I've been living abroad for a year and a half and have felt very unplugged from British theatre. Indeed, after we had our first baby a year ago, I've felt pretty unplugged from all theatre. But we got back on Monday and tonight I saw my first theatre show for some months: Common by D C Moore.

Now, don't get me wrong: I wasn't so unplugged that I'd heard nothing about the furore attached to this production. I'd heard there were some terrible  reviews, rumours of walkouts, cancelled previews, last-minute major surgery on the play and the production, a small firestorm of user comments on Time Out. But I didn't really engage too much with that. I didn't read any of the reviews. I couldn't actually find the user comments when I briefly tried to look, and it's not as if cancelled previews are unprecedented at the National. That's part of what previews are for.

So I went in kind of fresh, maybe with a small warning bell that this might be a tough evening. But what can I tell you, dear reader? I don't know if the production's just grown into its own skin or the detractors are all dimwits, but Common is a fantastic play, given a roaring and thrilling production by Jeremy Herrin.

What's it about? Oh Jesus, don't ask me. Loosely, we're in the early nineteenth century and Mary has returned to the rural common lands where she grew up. She is seeking the girl she loved before faking her own death and fleeing. But changes are afoot; specifically, the enclosure movement is going full throttle - the common land is being privatised. This is creating considerable tension both between the peasantry and the newly-landed gentry but also between different peasant factions: the English and Irish, protestants and catholics. Mary is blessed with a gift for mind-reading (probably) and for mischief (certainly) and she starts by twisting the locals around her finger. But she stirs up more tension than is good for her because her lover rejects her and the peasantry, in a strange rural ceremony, bury her alive. She survives this, miraculously, and is brought into the house of the local Lord, with whom she forms an unlikely alliance. She confronts her lover again and they seem to kill each other, though, again, Mary survives and now rules the manor house. She is on top and it seems her mixture of mischief and cruelty will be the making of our world too.

If that seems a little strange, well that's because it is. It's a very strange play, full of wickedly perverse ideas and images: a dead dog, a dead crow carrying the soul of a dead father, a countryside rite, endless reaping and hoeing, sapphic passions, incestuous passions, several deaths and rebirths, and always, everywhere the land, the land. The Olivier stage is covered in earth and we feel the failing of the harvest throughout. It's (literally) earthy and this anchors the writing. It's a production that could inflame your hay fever. In fact it did inflame my hay fever.

D C Moore has created a new theatrical language for this play. It's not trying exactly to represent historical period, but rather to give a sense of a whole different world. The language is coarse and poetic, funny and visceral. It's a staggering achievement and it's remarkably sustained the whole way through. Just listen to this lovely stuff:

The Cock Inn. I know madam, I know. A gentleman's inn at the far-roughest edge of this wideParish, that no gentleman is ever in, unless it's all changes these allyears since. But go we must: Destiny demands it. No, I do. And my quest. Oh yes you don't know yet my Name or Intent. You'll learn both, in the soonbloody mists of time. Just mean later, madam. In a bit. But do remember, please: rest not your faith on a single syllable I heretell. Unless you cannot resist me, which I'll allunderstand. You are not, as I have been all too-long: alone.

That mixture of music hall, of neologism, of dirty joke and tugging emotion, the storytelling and the world-building, but all of it totally theatrical. (Say it out loud if you don't believe me. It's language that moves the air - and in fact I think that's a phrase from the play.) I think the critics who have slagged this off can have no idea how bloody difficult it is to create a style like this and sustain it without it turning into self-indulgent word-mush. This play is full-throated and theatrical and funny (god it's funny).

What's it about? I'll be honest, only just got home, haven't had time to process it really, I might have a better idea in a week or so. But I like that. There are puzzles in the play: what Mary's real 'Intent' is. She starts absolutely as our heroine and guide, but as it goes on she seems less and less reliable and more and more sinister. What we are to do with that complexity is part of the fun of watching this play. It reminded me a lot of Howard Barker in the 1980s: those scenes where characters that we have come to like do something unconscionably vile to shake off any affection and make us ask hard questions about how easily we take sides, the clichéd barbarism of our morality. I also liked the way the play seems to be about the enclosures (and it is, a bit) but it's much more complex and epic and it shows huge sweeps of characters and the effects of not just putting up a few fences but the entire mindset that was changing right through the eighteenth century. It utterly resists the urge to be narrow. 

I mentioned Barker and actually the play really took me back to that wave of plays from the early seventies to the mid-eighties, those epic historical plays that mix poetry and dirt, politics and laughter. Particularly those plays with a kind of rural element to them that seem to draw something from that earth that is somehow not wholly rational to make the language dance. I'm thinking of Storey's Cromwell, Bond's Bingo or The Fool, Barnes's Red Noses, Brenton's The Romans in Britain, Churchill's Fen, Barker's Victory or The Castle, Robert Holman's Other Worlds, almost anything by David Rudkin. It's not like the more recent rural plays like Stuart Paterson's King of the Fields, Richard Bean's Harvest, or Jez Butterworth's Night Heron, The Winterling or Jerusalem. Paterson and Bean's plays don't have quite the same magic; Butterworth's have the magic but not the scale. These latter plays are partly about a domesticated countryside, seen cautiously, at one remove. This just goes for it. I've not seen a play go for it like this for a long time.

The cast is wonderful. Cush Jumbo (the ex-lover) is, as always, magnetic, somehow both elegant and ferocious. I absolutely adored Lois Chimimba as Eggy Tom, a lad who carries his father's soul in a crow around with him, and enjoyably seems sometimes to see us watching the play (who then seems to be reincarnated as a chamber maid with aspirations). Tim McMullan is funny and sinister, scary and pitiful as the syphilitic English Lord. Brian Doherty, Trevor Fox and John Dalgleish are superb as various members of the warring factions. But Anne-Marie Duff, oh dear God, this is such a fierce, funny, sexy, scary performance. She plays it like Shakespeare in a way, in the sense that she's putting a whole world on stage and doing so with delicacy and poetry, but it's completely lived and present. Glenda Jackson once said that Howard Barker's plays had 'writing you can taste in the mouth'. That's what this is and the joy is seeing Anne-Marie Duff dancing with it. The production is pretty great and I'd like to single out Paule Constable's lighting, which is just breathtaking in the use of dramatic side lighting, the occasional flashes of colour, and the versatile use of the cyc so that characters are sometimes reduced to shadow puppets or multiplied spectrally in shadow.

No it's not perfect. What ever is? There are some things that maybe don't quite mesh. Most difficult is the second half. Looking quickly at the published text, it looks as though there have been some pretty savage cuts inflicted on the second half. And I can see why; there's a certain level of complication that repeats the rhythmic patterns of the first half which would seem to slow the whole thing down: we want to get to some kind of moment of clarity or of striking climactic complexity and the play is probably a bit long. But, cutting for pace, they've disrupted the internal rhythm of several scenes, and occasionally I felt we were watching a kind of 'highlights' version of the second half, so quickly was plot spilling out over the stage. This tension between pace and rhythm is always there; it's a little bit a tension between art and entertainment and a bit of that tension is a good thing. Here it feels like pace won out but I'd have liked more faith in the rhythm.

And the production,. while good, feels oddly reserved about the Olivier. In particular, I sometimes kept wanting to pull the action a foot or two nearer us. The actors hugged the middle and rear of the stage a little. I wondered if this was directorial - Duff being the only one permitted far downstage because it gives her that privileged access to us. Maybe, maybe not. I think it would be wrong anyway, just Anne-Marie Duff's turn of the head and that cheeky crooked smile is another to single her out for us.

But these are quibbles. Common is great. Please give it a go.

May Poll

This campaign transformed, in seven weeks, from the most frustratingly predictable to the most thrillingly unpredictable General Election of my lifetime. The election was called by a cynical Theresa May, presuming she could capitalise on her personal and party's sky-high leads in polling and the apparent disarray of the Labour Party.

Unfortunately for her, she ran a disastrous campaign based on Lynton Crosby's three pronged strategy: (a) tight defence - establish a message and never, for one second, deviate from it; (b) give no hostages to fortune - try to be policy-free because then there's nothing for people to attack; (c) the dead cat strategy: if things are going bad throw a dead cat on the table - i.e. distract attention with something extreme and shocking.

All of these approaches failed. The first because the core message they ran on was her 'strong and stable' personality, but she doesn't have that personality, something that quickly became apparent. Theresa May is brittle and awkward; she thinks badly on her feet (she came apart in all the major interviews she did); she seemed on the verge of losing her temper much of the time. And strategy (a) was busted by the failure of strategy (b). She issues a very bland, very boring manifesto, with no eye-catching policies - except one, the so-called Dementia Tax that would require pensioners to pay for their own care after the first £100k. A few days later, Theresa May rowed back from that, announcing a ceiling as well as a floor. This was a disaster for three reason: one, it destroyed overnight the 'strong and stable' image; second, by blatantly lying and pretending that this wasn't a U-Turn she lost her reputation for being a straight talker; and third, this new policy was almost worse because it protected the very poor and the very rich and targeted middle-income pensioners, her natural constituency. And the dead cat strategy was to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of being a terrorist sympathiser: usually this might work, but first, after two terrorist attacks during the election campaign, this felt like she was turning the loss of life into a party political point; second, if anyone had been soft on terrorism, well, she'd been Home Secretary for 6 years, so she was hardly in a position to point a finger; third, it just seemed negative and weak.

A larger problem was that the election strategy was ill-suited to the election she'd called. She wanted a mandate; she was riding high in the polls; initially, people were talking about a Tory landslide. But she ran a campaign as if she were the underdog and needed to minimise her losses. The manifesto is where these two collided most disastrously. The defensive campaign was responsible for the general blandness of the document. The predicted landslide and personal mandate was responsible for the Dementia Tax policy. 

But now she has a problem and we, the country, have a problem. But some things are clear:

Theresa May, obviously, cannot remain as Prime Minister. She is terribly, terribly wounded. She has been humiliated. She let a 20+pt poll lead slip away into nothing. She spent £150m of public and other money to get a mandate and did not get one. Her political capital is spent. She is blamed by the party, scorned by the public. She is a pathetic figure. 

She is trying to struggle on by doing a deal with the DUP. The DUP have no place in our government. They are, in many respects, ignorant bigots on homosexuality, abortion, climate change, evolution, and more. They have just as close connections to unionist terrorism as Sinn Fein have to the IRA. And it would be dangerous to unbalance the delicate politics of the region (and the particular balance established by the Good Friday Agreement) to ally the Government so closely to one side. It is hard to imagine anyone accepting anything that the DUP would demand. A reduction on term limits for abortion or any explicit limitation on LGBT rights would be repellent to the centre of her party (Ruth Davidson has already protested). The soft Brexit that the DUP would want would be repellent to the right of her party. In the election, Theresa May lost the cities and the young. If she wants to set that pattern in stone, a really good way would be to buddy up with the DUP.

The Tories have no prospect of being able to form a stable government any time soon. May could not call another election. She would be instantly scorned. So she must wait for a challenger to come and make her humiliation complete. But who? Boris Johnson is popular among a dwindling band; he is very widely hated both within his own party and the public at large. David Davies probably wants the job but he is also hated by parts of his party. Furthermore, he is an arch-Brexiteer with a preference for a hard Brexit. But Theresa May wanted a mandate for her approach to the Brexit negotiations (which means a hard Brexit - no deal is better than a bad deal, etc.) and that has been decisively rejected. UKIP have been reduced to an irrelevance; the Tories were rejected by great swathes of the country. So it can't be him. Michael Gove is still cursed by his backstabbing last summer. Amber Rudd came perilously close to losing her seat in parliament so would be a risky choice.

And Brexit is coming. The clock is ticking, because, stupidly, Theresa May triggered Article 50 and then called an election, rather than, far more logically, the other way round. I think it is possible that the EU may agree to an extension, but to have to ask for one would be a terrible humiliation. Unless the case in the Irish courts finds that Article 50 can be untriggered, we are on a two-year countdown to being bounced out of the EU without a deal. We really need to focus on those negotiations not on all this stupid bullshit.

But we are where we are. So what to do?

I haven't mentioned Corbyn yet. Against all predictions, the Labour Party ran a brilliant campaign. They were almost entirely positive, offering the most exciting Labour Manifesto that I can remember (and I am nerdy enough to actually read them). They rarely descended into personal abuse; when May went low, they went high. They tactically outclassed the Tories at every turn; they handled the debates better than the Tories did; they turned a leak of the manifesto into a PR triumph; when the terrorist attacks happened, usually one would expect fear to drive voters back to the Tories (with their traditional strength in security and law and order), but they deftly avoided the traps; Corbyn proved himself to be an extraordinary and tireless campaigner, visibly at ease in his own skin (while Theresa May looked like she wanted to crawl out of hers). Labour lost the election but it feels like they won. This morning a new poll by Survation puts the Tories on 39% and Labour on 45%.

I still have my concerns about Corbyn, but this campaign has put to rest (for a while anyway) the sense of chaos and incompetence that has dogged them over the last two years. It must also have stilled the disquiet in the parliamentary party (for a while anyway). It is no longer impossible to imagine Jeremy Corbyn in Government. It is no longer impossible to imagine Jeremy Corbyn as  Prime Minister. For now, though, he doesn't have the numbers. He may do, after another election, but the Brexit clock is ticking.

This is what must happen.

• Theresa May must step down. She is doing no good to herself, her party or the country by carrying on.
• A national, cross-party team should be assembled to conduct the Brexit negotiations. It should include representatives from industry and the unions, from farms, fisheries, universities, and tech companies, experts in security and in the environment. It will have representatives from all parliamentary parties (sorry, Nigel) and all UK nations. We must buy in the best trade negotiators we can. It should be clear that the public have briefed these negotiators that everything is on the table, except a Hard Brexit.
• It follows from this that there should be a national government. This is a time of crisis. It is scarcely less urgent than a major war. Part of the stupidity of Theresa May's actions is her failure to understand what a crisis this is. We have two years to renegotiate our fundamental relationship with Europe. That has to be our primary focus over the next two years.

It has been said that this was an election in which everyone lost. If the country isn't to lose as well, Theresa May must turn her personal humiliation into a moment of cross-party consensus. It is the only way to save her reputation - and Britain's.

She still (just) has time.

A Splendid Time is Guaranteed For All

I seem to have lived through several fashion cycles of Which Is Considered The Greatest Beatles Album. When I was a teenager, it was generally thought to be Sgt Pepper. Then Abbey Road came to the fore. Then The White Album was the cognoscenti's choice. Currently Revolver seems to be the one. I think Rubber Soul had its moment in the sun a while ago. As is the way with the strange zero-sum games around the Beatles (to like Lennon you must denigrate McCartney), to think that Revolver is supreme sometimes involves picking holes in other records. And I've read a number of people dismissing Sgt Pepper for its whimsy, the supposed weakness of the songs, the paucity of its claim to be a concept album, its lack of rock'n'roll muscle, and no doubt other things I have forgotten.

But Sgt Pepper is my favourite Beatles album. In fact it may be my favourite album; I certainly can't think of another record that gives me such complete and pure joy from beginning to end. It's a funny, uplifting, moving, beautiful record, just so full of wit and invention and originality and generosity and love. It is remarkable how the opening song ('Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band'), while being essentially a fairly throwaway song, is funny (the moment when the audience laugh at something we can't see is perfect), it really fucking rocks (it's McCartney doing those fiercely electric guitar stings as the song opens and Ringo's drums are thunderous), it creates the sense of this strange imaginary band with great economy (electric guitar and a wind band), and even has time for a little hinted melancholy ('Sgt Pepper's lonely / Sgt Pepper's lonely'). And then the way it clears the way for 'Billy Shears' to sing 'With a Little Help From My Friends' is glorious and that song is sweet, cryptic, subversive, life-affirming and joyful.

I realised recently that my sense of the different Beatles albums is very much led by the covers. Even though I think Rubber Soul and Revolver are sonically quite similar, I always hear the first as warm and colourful while the latter is monochrome and 'electric'. I hear a restrained adult sheen on Abbey Road that is in part because of the foursquare photograph, while there's a dark tension in Let It Be that comes from the cover, not from - actually - a band working rather well together. And Sgt Pepper, well, I cannot help just see this as all the colours of the rainbow. The music, especially on side 1, just feels like the palette has been exploded. The songs are bursts of primary colour.

It may be true that there are better songs on other albums (except 'A Day in the Life' which may be their supreme moment), and, sure, if you take 'Fixing a Hole' in isolation, maybe it doesn't seem like The Beatles at their most profound. But that's the point: you don't take these songs in isolation. They work together so well. It's a brilliantly sequenced album. On CD or MP3, we miss the great theatrical device of the interval as we turn the LP over and go from the carnivalesque first-half closer of 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite' (which throws everything at us, dazzlingly) to the mysterious second-half opener of 'Within You Without You', which deepens the mystery of the record, complicates the identity of the band, and then, just when we might be adjusting to it, we get the slightly mocking laughter and then the glorious pisstaking pastiche of 'When I'm Sixty Four'. It's a record that moves too fast for us.

It's all context. No it's not a concept album like The Wall or Tommy (thank goodness), but it's a concept album in creating a 'fictional narrator' (the fictional band of the title) and creates the conceit that this is a single show and does so with a consistency and exuberance of style that allows for dramatic stylistic shifts (not just 'Within You Without You' to 'When I'm Sixty Four' but what about 'She's Leaving Home' to 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite', which is a cruelly brilliant transition). It's a record that completely hangs together, that is more pleasurable to listen to all the way through that to pick out individual songs.

But I think that way about the Beatles too. The thing that is so extraordinary about them is that journey. From 'Love Me Do' to 'The Long and Winding Road'... in seven years. I'm not sure I know a more extraordinary artistic journey than that of The Beatles. Who else was so productive, so restlessly challenging of themselves, managed to keep a vast popular audience while absolutely transforming the music they made and taking everyone else with them? They rarely put a foot wrong - their 'mistakes' (Magical Mystery Tour, the Yellow Submarine LP, Twickenham Studios) are a bit overblown and contain moments of genius. And what I love about Sgt Pepper is that it is The Beatles at their most ferociously experimental and their most popular. It is The Beatles in their imperial phase, hitting that sweet spot where everything they tried, however weird, turned out to be everything we wanted. Yes, maybe there are better individual songs elsewhere, but there's no better album.

I'm thinking of it again because of the astonishing new box set that gathers together a new remastering of the original album by Giles Martin (George's son) and a wealth of studio sessions. Sometimes these things can be a little mediocre but for this record these versions are fascinating and gorgeous. If you get a chance, listen to the way 'Strawberry Fields Forever' developed in the studio from the sweetly psychedelic folk of the first studio version to the bizarre, sweet, menacing, jagged thrill of the final version. These outtakes give a fascinating insight into the differences between Lennon's and McCartney's work. For McCartney, the song seems to be almost fully formed in his head and his relentless experimentation in the studio is about perfecting that, crafting the song, adding and riches upon riches; for McCartney, the studio is an endlessly thrilling resource for layering and building a song (you can hear 'Penny Lane' being built up in this way on the set). But with 'Strawberry Fields', Lennon does something quite different. The song structure is chopped around and reordered. Each take (on this collection anyway) is entirely different, with Lennon wholly reinventing the song each time. Take 7 is otherworldly and pastoral while Take 26 is bombastic and brassy. And then, famously, Lennon decided he liked the beginning of 7 and the end of 26, despite them being in different keys, leading to one half being slowed down and the other speeded up, just deepening the psychedelic challenge of this extraordinary song.

Alexis Petridis's perceptive review of the new record notes that in amongst the exuberant multicoloured joy of the record are some sharp notes of anomie and disquiet, from Lennon's sardonic observations of suburbia in 'Good Morning, Good Morning' to the casual domestic violence in 'Getting Better'. And this is true, in part, I think, because unlike most other Beatles records, this populates a vivid and complete world. There are the 'characters' of the record (the guy who blew his mind out in a car, Lucy in the Sky, Henry the Horse, Lovely Rita, and so on) but also a huge range of attitudes and moods. 'She's Leaving Home' is probably the most heartfelt and moving song they recorded ('Daddy, our baby's gone'), 'Mr Kite' is one of the funniest, and 'A Day in the Life' is just one of the strangest and grandest and most astonishingly confident moment in British cultural history.

Giles Martin's new mix of the album is great and worth buying on its own. The Beatles remasters in 2009 were and are a glorious revelation. The great discovery for me was the fluidity and invention of Paul McCartney's bass playing; in dozens of the songs it was now easy to focus on what his bass is doing and there were whole countermelodies going on, absurdly brilliant little curlicues going right up the fret, entirely counterintuitive dips and slides that turned melodically quite ordinary songs into things rich and strange. On this remix, I'd say it's Ringo's turn to shine. Yes, this is the album he learned to play chess, but his drums just seem thunderous on 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band'. He drives us peremptorily into the chorus of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. There's a wit to the staccato and cymbals in 'Getting Better' and some glorious fairground pastiche in 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite'. And, clearer than ever before, his wildly inventive and yet completely sympathetic percussion on 'A Day in the Life' both propel the song forward and up into the ether.

If you've not listened to Sgt Pepper for a long time or if - is this even possible? - you've never listened to it all the way through, now is the time. It will seem as fresh to you now as it felt fifty years ago today, when Sgt Pepper taught the band to play.

The Curious Incident of the Arts in the Nighttime

Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion's ability, but I saw by the inspector's face that his attention had been keenly aroused.
'You consider that to be important?' he asked.
'Exceedingly so.'
'Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.'
'The dog did nothing in the night-time.'
'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan-Doyle The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)

The dog that hasn't barked in this election is arts policy. But of course, some will say: the only thing that matters in this election is Brexit. And that's exactly how we got into this mess, with the atomisation of politics, meaning that people think you can vote for something like Brexit in isolation. In fact, as mature human beings, we should be able to care about several things at once. And the arts have been an important part of government policy since the 1940s, so it's not just the lack of imagination in the major parties' arts policy that is upsetting, it's the sheer lack of attention to the arts.

Neither the Green Party nor Plaid Cymru mention the arts at all. UKIP say nothing except that they're going to 'raise funding for new arts and heritage facilities in coastal towns', which is weird. As far as I can see, the SNP haven't issued a new manifesto for this election (but I'm happy to be corrected on this).

The three main English parties have a bit of a policy vacuum on the arts. Look at what the Lib Dem Manifesto promises:

• Maintain free access to national museums and galleries.

• Move towards introducing ‘safe standing’ at football clubs, requiring the Sports Grounds Safety Authority to prepare guidance for implementing this change.

• Protect the independence of the BBC and set up a BBC Licence Fee Commission, maintain Channel 4 in public ownership and protect the funding and editorial independence of Welsh language broadcasters.

• Protect sports and arts funding via the National Lottery.

• Maintain current standards of intellectual property (IP) protection with continuing co-operation on enforcement of IP generated in the UK and working within the EU to ensure the continuation of territorial licensing of rights.

• Create creative enterprise zones to grow and regenerate the cultural output of areas across the UK.

• Examine the available funding and planning rules for live music venues and the grassroots music sector, protecting venues from further closures. (pp. 65-66)

Of these seven pledges, five of them are just to keep things the way they are. The other two is to reintroduce some standing at football grounds (which is weirdly specific) and the creative enterprise zones across the country (which is weirdly vague).

The Conservative Manifesto doesn't have a section on arts policy, but under the clumsily-titled 'Stronger Communities from a Stronger Economy' section, there's a bit on 'Prosperous towns and cities across Britain' in which we find this:

Our towns and cities excel when they have vibrant cultural life. Britain’s arts and culture are world-beating and are at the heart of the regeneration of much of modern Britain. We will continue our strong support for the arts, and ensure more of that support is based outside London. We will maintain free entry to the permanent collections of our major national museums and galleries. We will introduce a new cultural development fund to use cultural investment to turn around communities. We will hold a Great Exhibition of the North in 2018, to celebrate amazing achievements in innovation, the arts and engineering. We will support a UK city in making a bid to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games. And in this 70th Anniversary Year of the Edinburgh Festival we will support the development of the new Edinburgh Concert Hall, reaffirming Edinburgh as the UK’s leading festival city and a cultural beacon around the globe. (p. 25)

Again, a lot of this is a pledge to keep things as they are (continue support for the arts - ha ha ha - and, like the Lib Dems, keep museums free) or reannouncing things that we already know (new Edinburgh Concert Hall). The rest is warm words ('vibrant cultural life') and pledges without detail (the Great Exhibition of the North, supporting a bid for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and the new cultural development fund). Like the Lib Dems they want to ensure that culture is spread throughout the regions, though they have little idea how to do that (they mention elsewhere that Channel 4 will relocate outside London, though they'd already announced that before they called the election, so it's hardly new). Not a lot of thought has gone into this.

And then there's Labour. One of the most interesting developments of this election is that the Labour Manifesto has been on the whole much bolder and more impressive than the Tories, even though it was the Tories who chose to hold a snap election. It has a section entitled 'Culture for All' under the section of 'Leading Richer Lives'. It's two pages, so I will summarise the policies:

1. A £1bn Cultural Capital Fund administered by Arts Council England to upgrade the cultural and creative infrastructure, along the lines of enterprise zones.
2. Maintain free museum entry & use the CCF to raise museum visibility.
3. End Local Authority cuts which will help libraries and museums.
4. Continue to mark the centenary of World War One.
5. £160m per year to support arts in schools.
6. Work to raise pay and employment standards for arts performers.
7. Work to increase diversity in radio, film and tv.
8. Work to improve the financial viability of digital arts work.
9. Expand business rate relief to small music venues.
10. Work to make internet companies remove dangerous material more quickly. (pp. 95-96)

Well at least there are some specific ideas. 1, 5 and 9 are clear and straightforward, though £1bn over five years is not a huge amount of money, especially if you're talking about infrastructure (and if it's administered by the Arts Council, does this mean Scotland is excluded?). They are also maintaining free museum entry, which makes me wonder - if no one is planning to reintroduce entry fees, why is this even a policy (like 'we make a solemn pledge not to murder zoo keepers')? It's not clear if 3 means reversing (restoring) the cuts or just freezing them. 6, 7, 8 and 10 are worthy aspirations but without much detail about how this will be done. And I'm not sure why 4 is in this section.

It's the Cultural Capital Fund that is the headline policy and this clearly shared the aspiration of the Lib Dems and Tories to spread cultural provision across the country (it is currently concentrated to an astonishing extent in London). It is welcome to see some flesh on the bones, unlike in the other manifestoes. But actually the policy is very top-down; it has nothing to say about how exactly more engagement in the arts will be fostered. How will people who never go to a concert, or a gallery, or a theatre be encouraged to go? Why, really, should they? How might national culture be rethought to appeal to the whole country? It is good that the arts will be supported in schools (and Labour and the Lib Dems have pledged to protect arts in the eBacc curriculum which is very welcome), but what about the primary curriculum too? This was a major growth area until Osborne's austerity cuts started to bite. So often, the arts are the first to go.

The Cultural Capital Fund is part of Labour's £250bn National Transformation Fund, a investment-for-growth fund. To that extent, it is embedded in their wider policy; for the Tories, culture is plainly an afterthought. The Liberal Democrats' reference to protecting IP looks small-scale and technical, but at least it shows that they are thinking about the arts in the context of Brexit. If we slip out of the EU without any deal on protecting intellectual property rights systematically across Europe, we will be isolating ourselves from that continent just at the time when, in theatre, we seem finally to be in a two-way cultural exchange and dialogue (not just sending our plays over there). It would be good to see more sense of the arts policy being integrated into all thinking across the parties.

On the whole, I think all of these manifestoes are rather unambitious, rather unimaginative, pretty disappointing. There's way too much keeping things as they are when, if there's one good thing that Brexit might do for us it's to challenge us to think differently about everything we do. Our political parties are not ready to think about the arts that way.

Tactical Voting

Theresa May, despite months of promising that she wouldn't, has called a General Election. She's called it for entirely cynical reasons. Oh, sure, she tells us that she wants to strengthen her hand in negotiations (why would it?) and that she wants to be able to stop people sabotaging Brexit (no one has), but the real reason is that she's ahead in the polls and British political history is littered with unelected Prime Ministers who failed to seize the moment to win a popular mandate and went on to be forced into an Election they lost (Callaghan 1978; Brown 2007). The Tories are riding high in the polls and Labour do appear to be in some disarray; May's hardline Brexit stance has seen off UKIP; the Lib Dems are on the mend but may still be haunted by their role in the Coalition; and in Scotland, the SNP are defending an almost impossibly strong performance in the last election against a mildly resurgent Tory group. So May thinks she can win and win soundly.

The last thing we need is a huge Tory majority. May - urged on by a coalition of far-right backbenchers, newspapers and partoes - has already shown her contempt for democratic process and given the sheer delusional stupidity of her Brexit stance ('I believe in Britain' she says, as if that means anything at all), the Tories need to be held to account more than ever.

So within an hour of hearing that May was calling an election, in a spirit of casting around for something to do, I bought the domain tactical2017.com (and .org and .net, for the sense of completion). I started trying to put together a website that would explain who to vote for if you wanted to oppose the Tories. Fortunately, because I'm not a web designer, this attracted the attention of some web-savvy people and, most crucially, I connected with Becky Snowden who had put together a smart spreadsheet, based on the 2010 and 2015 General Elections, that provided some strong evidence for who had the best shot against the Tories. This escalated and within a few days, we had a great, clear, eye-catching website, a logo, and a ton of newspaper coverage.

No one should vote tactically in an ideal world; all things being equal, you should just vote for who you believe in. But this is not an ideal world and all things are not equal. Our ridiculous First Past the Post system is useless, unjust, and produces absurd distortions of the popular will. It is fundamentally undemocratic - and it lies behind the grotesque spectacle of Theresa May believing that a Government should be defended from the impertinence of Parliament.

So, if you want to keep Theresa May accountable to parliament, you have to vote tactically. Realistically (in England, Scotland and Wales) that means voting Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru or, in a couple of places, Green. That's what our site helps you do - and we're continuing to update it we process the impact of the local elections, where the Tories significantly underperformed in terms of vote share but (because except in Scotland, the local elections are also run on a First Past the Post basis) overperformed in terms of seats.

Will Theresa May lose the election? I doubt it. But it will be no good for democracy or the future of the country if she gets a 100-seat majority (on what will certainly be less than half of the votes and probably more like a third of those eligible to vote). So please, wherever you are, check our website and vote whatever it takes to keep the Tories out.

I'm a Labour supporter and pretty much always have been. I haven't always voted Labour though; I voted Green once, for an Independent once, and Lib Dem once (in a seat where Labour didn't stand a chance).