DCMS wastes a lot of money. There are some good and important things it funds. But too often the department spends money in ways I think are inexcusable.
So today the Conservatives announced we will make a billion of savings from the DCMS budget.
Is there scope to do this? Lots. For starters, Labour are increasing their budget by £700 million.
In this piece I want to focus on just one of the arms-length bodies DCMS funds - Arts Council England (ACE). Not all our planned savings will come from ACE. But there is plenty of scope to cut wasteful spending there.
Every year, ACE gives large sums to projects which:
Reflect the narrow obsessions of the urban left with race, sexuality and gender.
Are built on a balkanised version of multiculturalism, and are aimed at narrow identity-politics groups, rather than a shared culture.
Are poor value for money, could be provided commercially - and lack any clear rationale for taxpayers to be paying for them through compulsory taxation.
Simply browsing the lists of what ACE is spending on is very radicalising. It spends money in a way that is frankly on the edge of parody.
We will look at some examples of that in a moment, but before we do, hold this image in your mind:
There are men and women in my constituency getting up before dawn and working bloody hard in normal jobs. They are coming home in the cold completely knackered, and then feeding the kids or looking after their nan or washing up or taking the bins out. They are worrying about bills, and not doing lots of things they’d like to do.
Then the government is taking their hard earned money away in tax, not allowing them to spend it themselves, and instead insisting it is spent on the following things…
National Portfolio Organisations
Let’s start with the ACE National Portfolio Organisations - arts organisations, museums and libraries, who can apply for multi-year investment. The most recent published list was of the 2026/27 extension period. These include:
£285,576 for Applause Rural Touring. Their new touring show, announced last week, is called ‘George and the Drag Queen’ and is billed as being “against a backdrop of quintessential Englishness, the show exposes the complexity of the modern debates around migration, gender identity, and community and how people can be caught between loyalty and fear”.
£106,691 for The87Press, describing itself as ‘established on principles of equity, (late) modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, environmentalism, and social justice’. Their output includes essays on anti-colonial art, poems and lectures on Marxism. According to the Jewish Chronicle, after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 the publisher’s director, Azad Ashim Sharma asked for a “debunking” of (accurate) British media reports that there had been rapes. Their website notes that: after “a public lecture series on Marxist Theory with Sean O’Brien, the87press ascended to Arts Council England’s National Portfolio in 2023”
£183,042 for Shubbak, whose programmes ‘support and celebrate the diversity of Arab and South West Asian & North African (SWANA) artists’ creativity and innovation’. Last year, Shubbak designed ‘An Artist’s Manual Against Apartheid’, offering practical guidance on “cultural resistance”.
£567,257 for Apples and Snakes, which ‘develop and champion performance poets and foreground Black British artists’. Apples and Snakes were previously given £463,000 despite supporting highly political events including a “vigil for black girls and boys dehumanised in our education and policing system”.
£163,524 for Peepal Tree Press, which describes itself as “Decolonising bookshelves since 1985”. Their website carries a statement criticising “apartheid repression by the Israeli state”.
£64,014 for Dialled In, a festival of South Asian music and culture. Co-founder Dhruva Balram said he wanted to create a space where “brown bodies could come together and celebrate and express their creativity”. According to Hyphen magazine:
Balram notes that they’re also very selective about the sponsors and partners they’re willing to work with. The Dialled In team is not afraid to chant “Free Palestine” at their gigs or take to the streets in support of community protest action. “If somebody isn’t aligned with us then unfortunately it’s not something that we can work towards,” Balram says.
I am trying not to editorialise as I go here, but I do find it hard. So apologies, but:
£108,654 for Homotopia Limited, a ‘queer arts and culture festival’ based in Liverpool.
What about a festival everyone could go to, whether they are gay or not? What about gay people who associate the divisive word ‘queer’ with the most hateful kind of school bullies?
£361,536 for Tiata Fahodzi, ‘a black-led, artist-centred British African heritage theatre company that is driven to support global majority artists historically excluded’.
There is no “global majority”. The idea that ‘all the brown people are one big group’ is crazy racism when you think about it for more than a nanosecond.
‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP)
ACE also makes awards for ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP), the fund for individual artists. ACE says it supported 1,220 individuals through DYCP in 2024/25, who received £14.2 million in grants. While not the largest amount of money, they do illustrate the absurd atmosphere within the arts world.
Some grants are straightforwardly woke and do exactly as they say on the tin:
£11,948 for ‘Developing Queer Feminist Painting Practice’.
£12,000 for ‘Developing my Swing Dance Practice’.
£12,000 for ‘Learning How To Write Long Poems About Big Things (While Being Disabled)’.
£10,408 for ‘Queer fiction and queer non-fiction writing; two book proposals, and further study in this new field for me’.
£11,945 for ‘Send In The Clowns! Establishing a Local Clown Community’.
Others have incomprehensible names which are less clear. These include:
£11,852 for ‘The materiality of straw’.
£12,130 for ‘Hostile Interior Design’.
£2,400 for ‘Curating Cursed Objects’.
£8,837 for ‘Project Become A Badass Performer and Community Creative’.
£13,284 for ‘My Fingertips are Holding onto the Cracks in My Foundations - Kate Nash’
National lottery funds
Arts Council England also gets given a load of the money from the national lottery. This is not a tax, but it is a stream of money controlled by the government which it could do many good things with. What do ACE do with it? Stuff that can unite everyone, right? Stuff anyone might go to? Nope.
£48,561 for ‘Holy Show Regional Tour 2025’, a ‘queer drag comedy’, ‘exploring club culture, Irish Catholicism and queerness through stand-up, live music and audience participation’.
£31,251 for ‘Queer Dance Adaptation of Edward II with Young People in Barnsley’. The touring production is described as ‘hormone-fuelled, spectacularly camp and aggressively poignant’.
£99,500 to Curious Arts Ltd, including funding for ‘an action research approach to LGBTQIA+ family programmes’ and ‘Curious Festival 2026 planning’.
£33,562 for ‘Trans Joy on Tour’; £12,450 for ‘Trans Pride Hastings 2025’; and £7,943 to Camp Trans CIC for a ‘Trans Writing Course’.
They have also awarded:
£85,046 for a ‘Queer & Black Music Programme’ at District, a nightclub and music venue in Liverpool.
£31,925 for an ‘LGBTQ Asylum Seeker Workshops and Audio Drama Project’.
£30,580 for ‘Faggamuffin Bloc Party: Queering Carnival Culture & Supporting LGBTQ+ Afro-Caribbean Artists’, a ‘carnival sound system, run by and for queer people of colour’.
£36,752 for ‘Mother Tongue: An Interdisciplinary Festival and Cultural Programme of Diasporic Queer Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Expression’.
£29,684 to help scale ‘JEEZUS!’, a ‘Latinx Queer Musical Theatre’ project, from ‘small fringe venues to mid-scale theatre stages and a UK-wide regional tour’.
Honestly, some of the things seem like a fever dream or a Tom Wolfe-style parody of the left:
£18,167 went to a ‘Palestinian Circus School tour’.
£30,000 for ‘Pakistan Week’ in Birmingham - why do my constituents need to fund this?
£10,000 was awarded to Mona Manjot Kaur Dhaliwal for an activity called ‘Re-membering South Asian Feminist Poetics’ in Brighton. Dhaliwal published a thesis earlier this year, the main argument of which is ‘that the coopting of women’s identities into patriarchal, colonial and nationalistic projects obscures histories of bordering and lived experiences of multiplicity. This overlooks the developments and insights of critical consciousness and the perspectives of feminist poetics.’
Sorry, what?
Years of rubbish
If we go back further, we can see that this has been going on for years.
In 2022, one of their National Portfolio funded organisations, Artichoke, produced a nationwide billboard exhibition which included posters reading ‘Hey Straight White Men, Pass The Power!’.
When I first saw these I was in the middle of my first attempt to make a black woman Prime Minister, so I didn’t really feel I needed a highly-divisive taxpayer funded poster to make this point.
On and on it goes, through the years.
In 2022/23, £86,295 was awarded to the 1623 Theatre Company for Stage 1 research and development of ‘Queer Folio’, a celebration of LGBTQ+ creativity in response to Shakespeare’s First Folio. The project produced ‘30 new works-in-progress’, including ‘Othello Re:MX’, described as ‘a queer dance of Black trans identity, inspired by Othello’; ‘All’s Well’, ‘a queer gig of chronic illness, inspired by All’s Well That Ends Well’; and ‘Mucky Titus’, ‘a queer orgy of punk and kink, based on Titus Andronicus’.
Between 2019/20 and 2023/24, Arts Canteen received £104,999 for its ‘Arab Women Artists Now’ festivals. The 2024 festival featured HABIB-TATI, described as ‘an Iraqi/Iranian-Armenian DJ who is passionate about decolonizing music’; Sabine Coucair, ‘an award-winning humanitarian clown’; and a ‘special edition of Arabs Are Not Funny’, performed by five Arab women comedians.
In 2022/23, £71,685 was awarded for ‘The Bull and the Moon: Family Production Supporting Trans Childhood, Touring Nationally’, a ‘production targeting children and young people aged five and over who may identify as non-binary, trans or other gender denominations, as well as their families, carers and educators’. The project also offers ‘exciting activities for people of all ages to celebrate their uniqueness’, including ‘drag makeup workshops’ and ‘gender-bending tango’.
In 2015, £14,000 was awarded to a production of ‘The Siege’, which The Spectator described as a polemic glorifying the actions of Hamas terrorists during the Second Intifada. The production’s co-director, Zoe Lafferty, said that ‘to have to engage in whether Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Brigade are terrorists is the wrong question to ask’.
Between 2023 and 2026, Stratford East received £1.13 million annually as a National Portfolio Organisation. In 2023, it hosted a ‘Black Out’ show, at which ‘an all-Black-identifying audience could experience and discuss events in performing arts, film and cultural spaces free from the white gaze’.
This is what used to be called “segregation” - and should not be funded by the taxpayer.
Taxpayers are being made to fund things that are divisive, left wing propaganda and ultimately… rubbish. Sometimes all three at once.
For example, in 2022/23, £82,531 was awarded to Black Curatorial, whose vision is ‘to build spaces that encourage creative and curatorial growth for Black people globally’. The organisation describes its work as ‘spirit led with the intention of bunning babylon and healing trauma through immersive curatorial projects’ and says it ‘value[s] Black Epistemology and only curate[s] public events centring Black knowledge producers and creatives’. Its website also features an image overlaid with the words: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll colonise them back’.
The organisation’s founder, Aliyah Hasinah, has written about funding for Black organisations in a piece titled ‘Money needs to flow for all of us to survive’. She wrote: ‘I’m tired of little pieces of money being thrown at Black organisations’ and ‘I don’t care about whiteness. I don’t care and I have no time for the disposition of benevolence that exists within the colonial structures of foundation and grant making in the UK’. She also stated: ‘I also want reparations’, adding that ‘A lot of that benevolence money needs to go back to the Caribbean’.
In the same piece, Hasinah wrote: ‘I refuse to be beholden to the UK Charity Commission’s legislation because it’s racist, and racist in a very guided form, which I think a lot of people don’t understand as racism or classism or sexism or homophobia, and various other isms and schisms.’
Why are my constituents made to fund this?
Other examples include:
£32,025 to ‘Climate Pride’ in 2024/25, which explores climate justice through an LGBTQIA+ lens. The organisers say this is necessary because ‘in focusing the conversation on future generations, climate activism is often explored within heteronormative worlds’.
£20,935 to ‘Queer Pleasure Archive: Building on LGBTQIA+ Heritage’ in Newcastle in 2024/25, described as a ‘socially engaged art project and new DIY archive’ which was ‘born out of a lack of positive and joyful representation of queer people in archives and collections’ and sought to ‘delve into how Queer pleasure could be documented’.
£19,300 to ‘Sapphic Voices’ in Ealing in 2024/25. The organisers say the Arts Council funding will ‘support the project which aims to platform, mentor and support 6 queer female and non-binary musicians in the Southwest’.
£29,895 to ‘Crap at Animals: Engaging Local Under-Represented Communities in Biodiversity Through Play, Clowning and Outdoor Performance’ in Bristol in 2023/24, billed as ‘one guy tries heroically and fails epically to do impressions of 48,000 rare animals in under an hour’.
£49,850 to ‘Muslim Artists Academy’ in 2022/23. Their website lists ‘modesty’ as one of its five principles, stating: ‘Dress decently and in line with an Islamic ethos’.
£22,932 to ‘For a Palestinian’ in 2022/23, staged at Camden People’s Theatre and Bristol Old Vic. The one-man show follows the story of translator and activist Wa’el Zuaiter, who was alleged to have had connections to Black September, the Palestinian militant organisation responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympic attack.
£44,940 in 2019/20 to ‘Mariposa, a transgender ballet reimagining of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly’, billed as ‘a truly innovative retelling of a classic opera that sheds light on the harshness of life for the homosexual and transgender community in the Hispanic Caribbean’.
Tara Theatre were granted £422,000 to carry out projects including “Unconscious? Exploring Bias in UK Theatre”.
The Beacon Collective were given £163,333 a year and aimed to “support organisations addressing intersectional oppression.”
There are also examples involving organisations receiving substantial annual funding as National Portfolio Organisations.
The Spectator reported that Collections Trust, which received £234,232 a year between 2023 and 2026 and £249,903 in 2026/27, shared guidance for museums which described Hamas as ‘anti-colonial freedom fighters’. (They then removed the link once it was reported in the press and said they hadn’t spotted this).
Soho Theatre, which received £614,582 a year in 2023-26, and £655,701 in 2026/27, was forced to ban the comedian Paul Currie after an incident in which he allegedly pulled out a Palestinian flag and shouted at an Israeli audience member demanding they leave, before leading chants of “Palestine will be free”. Soho Theatre described the behaviour as ‘unacceptable’ and said it ‘has no place on our stages’.
And to look forward to this weekend (3rd-4th of October), the Arts Council have helped fund ‘Decolonise Fest 2026’, ‘a London punk festival by and for punx of colour’, which aims to ‘decolonise punk’ and ‘put the threat back into punk again’. They note their ‘collective is made up of activists, militant community organisers, musicians, and artists’. Workshops include ‘Disrupting Exclusion: An Abolitionist Approach to Education’, ‘which focuses on the impact exclusion and oppressive education has on children and young people’, and ‘Land Back! Why We Need Land Justice, Food Sovereignty and Reparations’ which promises to discuss ‘why we need land more than ever for the revolution’.
Conclusions
I can see an argument for a government unit that looks to preserve our core national heritage. There are certain things we inherit in trust which must be looked after for future generations.
What we have in ACE is not that.
Take just one example. Our parish churches are among our greatest cultural inheritances, filled with 1500 years worth of art. Yet many are falling into ruin. The government has, naturally cut funding for the Listed Place of Worship scheme which gives VAT relief to communities who raise funds to repair churches. Clearly our actual national heritage is much less important than all the worthy projects above.
The bottom line is that organisations like ACE are run by an out of touch, out of control, left wing elite, who are high as a kite spending the money of my constituents on utter, utter drivel.
Sorry, I don’t want them to waste any more of my constituents’ hard-earned wages on this utter crap.
Give us our money back.
I think the criticisms you’re highlighting here are important. However, it’s also important to highlight the good work done via arts council funding. Some really important institutions such as the National Theatre, the RSC, plus important regional theatres benefit from arts council funding. They then work their socks off to sell tickets and raise money through private means. Many of them are badges of pride for the country; others are real local hubs for their community.
War Horse began at the National, Matilda began at the RSC, other shows like Operation Mincemeat (big, award winning global hit) received ACE funding.
How do you make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here? How do you ensure that the good work done by art council grants continues, whilst some of it more identity-obsessed, less unifying projects plough their own furrow?
Wholly agree with all of this. Whilst it's right and proper that talented artists are helped to produce their art, since the arts generally pay poorly, publicly funded art should be for all and for the betterment of the nation. ACE's giving policy shows they are giving to their idea of an ideologically pure few. Virtue signalling and the spread of identity politics is not art.