| 'Most successful cultural mixing in the arts is the result of the market - not public funding.' |
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It would be hard to overestimate the importance of diversity to the development of British cultural life.
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Not just the richness of an Anglo-Saxon language combined with a Norman vocabulary, and additions from Scandinavia, India, and the Shtetl; not just the German romantic influence on our giddy poets, or the coat-tails of the continent's modernist art movements; not even just the contribution of the colonies, black (VS Naipaul, CLR James, Hanif Kureishi, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Chris Ofili) and white (TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Fay Weldon, Robert Hughes), or the unique contribution of Ireland (Wilde, Beckett, Behan, Deane).
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And when we turn from the high arts to popular culture the distinction 'British cultural life' is more or less redundant. Like most of the globe, audiences for popular music and film are served principally by an America that shows an insatiable appetite for cross-cultural fertilisation, from the ghettos and barrios  .
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In the midst of this great flux it is interesting to see how modest the contribution of arts policy has been. It was not the subsidised arts, in the regional galleries, the National Theatre, the opera, or the big orchestras that generated cultural diversity. This is surprising, given that the importance of ethnic culture has been a priority of funding organisations for decades.
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And yet it has been the market, not public funding, that has generated the lion's share of successful cultural mixing in the arts. There is something quaintly old-fashioned about the demands for special support for black arts when novelists like Zadie Smith and Monica Ali top the bestsellers' lists, and agents are avidly hunting for Asian talent.
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By contrast to the market, the top-down multi-cultural policy has produced precious few good works or talents. Hanif Kureishi - whose first break was a stint as writer in residence at the Royal Court - was no doubt patronised, but also earned his place through excellent writing. It is telling that Kureishi's talent for parody is at its sharpest when dealing with the indulgence of white liberals. But then this is one, if not the dominant, theme of most black-British writing, right through the Buddha of Suburbia to East and East.
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It could be argued that the quasi-official attempts to advance multiculturalism in the 1970s and 80s - awkward as they were - were nonetheless the precondition for the flux of new works from minorities. There is, no doubt, a relationship between the policy of multiculturalism and the decline of a stridently white English culture.
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But it is not the relationship that is regularly assumed. Most would credit multiculturalism with breaking down the barriers to other cultures, through its assault on the 'ivory tower' of Englishness. It would be truer to say that it was a declining confidence in the superiority of English civilisation that encouraged the emergence of multiculturalism - an outward expression of that decline.
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And the policy of multiculturalism is quite distinct from any spontaneous cultural mixing. A 'policy for diversity' seems forced, like trying to arrange an accident. Born of guilty self-loathing in the culturati, multiculturalism tends to reward people for their ethnic origins rather than their talents, as if, somehow, it was an achievement in itself for black people to set pen to paper.
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Too often the policy remit confused the promotion of artistic excellence with the promotion of black enterprise. Mike Phillips recalls his days on the Greater London Council's (GLC) Ethnic Arts Committee, where judgements of merit were pushed aside by the imperative to 'get the money out of the building'
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Where diversity implies freedom, the experience of multiculturalism as policy is a rather pricklier one. Artist Patrick Hughes recalled a commission from the famine-relief campaign, Visual Aid: his skeleton with a Robertson's Golliwog head was supposed to be a critique of the racism that led to famine, but was censored by the organisers for being itself racist.
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It is likely that the many minority artists contributing to today's cosmopolitan arts support, or even identify with the policy of multiculturalism, even if they are not directly its beneficiaries (though it is not always the case, as VS Naipaul's embittered portrait of decolonisation shows). It would be churlish to expect artists to opt out of the mood of the times: many writers and painters did good work with an agitational intent during the 'pink decade' of the 1930s, too. But in the end it was the art, not the politics that shone through: Auden who succeeded, Brecht who failed.
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There is something faintly absurd about the complaints of the 'Eclipse Report' on 'Developing strategies to combat racism in theatre'. It is shocking to read that only four percent of people working in the theatre are African Caribbean or Asian, or that only six percent of people working for organisations funded by the Arts Council were from minorities . But when you consider that only six percent of the population of the UK is non-white that sounds unexceptional. Are black people really being held back by a lack of positive images in theatres that are in any event attended by a tiny - and enduringly liberal - percentage of the population?
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Looking at the British Council's promotional material for foreign visitors, it is pointed just how much the country makes of its relatively small ethnic minorities - trumpeting a 'multicultural' Britain, which outside of its larger cities is uniformly white. In the 1970s, East London's Brick Lane was seen as a social problem. Today it is a Mecca for tourists and culture vultures. 'Come and look how multicultural we are' is the message of the London brand.
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By comparison to the spontaneous mixing of cultures, official multiculturalism is predatory upon the black experience, repackaging it is a morality play of victimisation, redemption and community that is simply crass.
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James Heartfield is author of a number of books and articles, including
Great Expectations: the creative industries in the New Economy. His analysis of cultural consumption 'The Economy of Time' is published in the current issue of Cultural Trends, and 'Capitalism and anti-capitalism' will appear in the coming edition of Interventions.
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