Witnesses say forces fired teargas at up to 4,000 demonstrators in the southern city of Deraa and that shots were heard Security forces in Syria are reported to have fired teargas and fired shots in the air as anti-government protests flared again in the southern city of Deraa . The unrest followed clashes in Latakia over the weekend in which at least 12 people died and promises by the authorities to lift emergency laws restricting public gatherings and allowing arrests on the grounds of national security. A witness told Associated Press that forces had fired tear gas as up to 4,000 people protested in Deraa. He said security forces fired tear gas at first. He also heard gunfire, although it appeared guns were being fired in the air. A witness told Reuters news agency demonstrators had converged on a main square in the city, chanting “We want dignity and freedom” and “No to emergency laws”. Security forces have struggled to deal with unrest in the southern city and other centres but authorities have held out the prospect of decisions that would “please the Syrian people” in the next two days. An announcement by president Bashar al-Assad was promised by the vice-president Farouq al-Shara speaking on Lebanese Hezbollah’s al-Manar television. There were no details. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he had spoken to the Syrian president twice over the weekend urging reforms. “They told us they were working on political parties … we hope these measures are actually implemented rather than remaining promises,” Erdogan said. “We did not receive a negative answer when we urged Mr Assad to listen to the voice of people. I hope he makes the announcement today or tomorrow … It is impossible for us to remain silent in the face of these events, we have a 800km-long border with Syria.” Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Protest James Meikle guardian.co.uk
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• I don’t want to look too flighty on my résumé • Is it OK to admit a mistake in taking a job? At the start of each week, we publish the problems that will feature in this Saturday’s Dear Jeremy advice column in the Guardian Work supplement, so readers can offer their own advice and suggestions. We then print the best of your comments alongside Jeremy’s own insights. Here are this week’s dilemmas – what are your thoughts? Problem one: I don’t want to look too flighty on my résumé I joined my current employer as a temp for a month in April 2007. I then left for six months because I got what was (at the time) my dream job in a small advertising agency. This was a major change in career direction for me, but they were unwilling to take me on permanently. I came back to my current employer in December 2007, left again in August 2008 for three months to try advertising once again, but that didn’t work out either. So I came back in December 2008 and have been at the company ever since. I am working on contract on a specific project, which is soon to end. I have been promoted twice and am a valued member of the team with excellent performance appraisals. I enjoy working here and there may be a permanent role in the offing, but I am not sure if it will be one that will interest me. I have spent some time analysing what went wrong with my abortive career change and the feedback I was given (I wasn’t the right personality or skills fit with their existing teams). I have realised I should focus on larger, more structured companies and look for roles where my enthusiasm for improving systems and processes is useful (rather than the possibly threatening way it was seen in smaller, more staid companies). I also think that advertising was too much of a change whereas something midway between my old career and new ambitions would make a lot more sense. My current role is a step in that direction as it is based in a large media organisation. Prior to this I spent three years working for one employer and seven years working for another, so overall my career has been quite stable. How do I present this history accurately and honestly in a résumé so I don’t look like I have something to hide but equally, potential employers won’t see me as someone likely to leave. Should I drop the second three-month stint in advertising and just explain (if I get an interview) that there was a short gap in the middle of my most recent employment? Problem two: Is it OK to admit a mistake in taking a job? I got a new job six months ago, but it’s not working out for lots of reasons. Should I take something temporary to save my rapidly disappearing sanity, or hold out for something more permanent? I have started applying for jobs and have been offered a six-month contract at my last employer (they’d love to have me back) which could turn permanent, although there is no guarantee of this. Do I take the temporary job to get out and apply for other roles? Or do I stick with what I have – despite being miserable to the point of crying every day – and wait for something permanent? Will a prospective employer see my decision to move for what it is – a bad fit – or think I am fickle? I can’t leave with no job because I have a mortgage to pay. What are your thoughts? • For Jeremy’s and readers’ advice on a work issue, send a brief email to dear.jeremy@guardian.co.uk . Please note that he is unable to answer questions of a legal nature or reply personally Work & careers Graham Snowdon guardian.co.uk
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The UK public perceives poverty as a consequence of war, famine and natural disasters, and despite giving, see donation as a flawed response. It’s time to change their minds Over the last 10 years I’ve been looking at the question of how the UK public engages with global poverty. I’ve done this research with a variety of NGOs, including Comic Relief, and have reviewed the evidence on public engagement for DfID on four occasions. Following the most recent of these reviews – probably the bleakest – Martin Kirk at Oxfam got in touch and suggested we attempt to find solutions to the problems I was so familiar with documenting. At the same time, Tom Crompton at WWF was drafting his report, Common Cause (pdf) , identifying a shared set of values on which all third sector organisations should be campaigning in order to deepen and widen their connections with the UK public. The result of our collaboration, a report called Finding Frames , launches on Monday. In terms of perceptions of poverty, the UK public appears to be stuck in 1985. You could conduct your own survey with the public today – on the bus, at the school gates, or in the pub – and I would wager you’d find the same things as I’ve been finding in research for a decade. Poverty in poor countries arises from internal causes: war, famine, natural disasters, over-population, and of course corruption – currently the UK public’s top cause of poverty, when asked in DfID surveys . And all we can do, they would say is to give money, which probably won’t reach the people for whom it is intended. This has been called the “Live Aid Legacy”. One respondent in research for Save the Children in 2009 said: “What’s happened since Live Aid? I was at school then. Now I’m 36 and nothing has really changed.” Development NGOs are deeply implicated in this. While the research evidence on public perceptions shows levels of concern about global poverty to be static at best, and more likely falling, the available data on fundraising show a contradictory pattern: steadily increasing annual growth in public donations to development NGOs, particularly marked since 1995. In Finding Frames, we ask ourselves how this can have been achieved against a backdrop of ebbing public concern. The answer appears to relate directly to the adoption of new fundraising methods by the sector (for instance, the introduction of direct debit arrangements in the mid-1990s), as part of a wider shift in the way NGOs engage with the public. In the academic literature on social movements, this shift is described as the rise of “chequebook participation”, as the quality of the engagement between organisation and member is changed, and the organisations morph into “protest businesses”, with strong management structures and, increasingly, targets for growth. The transaction model of public engagement has worked for fundraising, but we argue it has played into the Live Aid legacy, with its emphasis on the power of giving, and little else. A quick look at the communications strategies adopted by the sector shows that, in order to achieve the same or greater levels of donation, the content of the material has got harder, more heart-rending, and with less context. It is fair to ask where campaigns and fundraising will go next to keep income rising. Make Poverty History provided an opportunity to break out of the transaction frame. By rallying around the call for “justice not charity”, it attempted to disrupt the stubborn perception that “all we can do is give money”. Yet, as it turned out, the transaction frame proved too strong. In focus groups we ran around the event, the public repeatedly stated that it must be raising money, from all those wristbands and text messages. When in the end, Live8 became the finale to the activity around the G8, the public’s certainty about the transactional model was confirmed (“Live8 was the event, ‘Make Poverty History’ was the slogan” said one respondent). Inadvertently, MPH had reinforced the Live Aid legacy. It is our contention that it is time to have another go at breaking that legacy, once and for all. We have marshalled a body of theoretical and empirical evidence around values and frames, which we use as lenses through which to see the problem of public engagement. Through these lenses we also point to solutions, for ways out of this stalemate in public engagement. We do not dictate the solutions though, as it is critical that the development sector comes together to work them out for themselves, in collaboration. Whatever the new frames for global development are, they will need to work for all organisations. Most obviously, the frames we find will need to enable NGOs to keep raising the revenue they need now, but without jeopardising public engagement over the longer term. Happily, we think there are solutions out there: at community level, in faith groups, in academic thought, and in development as it is taking place in the global south (not least through south-south partnerships). All this amounts to a big change in how NGOs pursue their missions to end global poverty – from how they draft their business plans, to how they fundraise, campaign, or work with their volunteers. Most strikingly, it suggests they should frame their messages differently; seen from this perspective, “charity” “aid” and “development” are all problematic terms. The findings in the report are not new. But the quest for positive frames to re-engage the public in global poverty will take us in new directions. If all this strikes a chord with you, we recommend you read the report, and then think about how you can get involved in this new agenda. And let us know what you think below – what do you see as the problems of a transaction model of aid and the Live Aid Legacy? What new strategies of campaigning and communication might motivate people to have a deeper, more meaningful engagement than simply signing a cheque – and what implications might that have for the sector? • Andrew Darnton is an independent researcher, and lead author of Finding Frames Aid Live 8 Live Aid guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The UK public perceives poverty as a consequence of war, famine and natural disasters, and despite giving, see donation as a flawed response. It’s time to change their minds Over the last 10 years I’ve been looking at the question of how the UK public engages with global poverty. I’ve done this research with a variety of NGOs, including Comic Relief, and have reviewed the evidence on public engagement for DfID on four occasions. Following the most recent of these reviews – probably the bleakest – Martin Kirk at Oxfam got in touch and suggested we attempt to find solutions to the problems I was so familiar with documenting. At the same time, Tom Crompton at WWF was drafting his report, Common Cause (pdf) , identifying a shared set of values on which all third sector organisations should be campaigning in order to deepen and widen their connections with the UK public. The result of our collaboration, a report called Finding Frames , launches on Monday. In terms of perceptions of poverty, the UK public appears to be stuck in 1985. You could conduct your own survey with the public today – on the bus, at the school gates, or in the pub – and I would wager you’d find the same things as I’ve been finding in research for a decade. Poverty in poor countries arises from internal causes: war, famine, natural disasters, over-population, and of course corruption – currently the UK public’s top cause of poverty, when asked in DfID surveys . And all we can do, they would say is to give money, which probably won’t reach the people for whom it is intended. This has been called the “Live Aid Legacy”. One respondent in research for Save the Children in 2009 said: “What’s happened since Live Aid? I was at school then. Now I’m 36 and nothing has really changed.” Development NGOs are deeply implicated in this. While the research evidence on public perceptions shows levels of concern about global poverty to be static at best, and more likely falling, the available data on fundraising show a contradictory pattern: steadily increasing annual growth in public donations to development NGOs, particularly marked since 1995. In Finding Frames, we ask ourselves how this can have been achieved against a backdrop of ebbing public concern. The answer appears to relate directly to the adoption of new fundraising methods by the sector (for instance, the introduction of direct debit arrangements in the mid-1990s), as part of a wider shift in the way NGOs engage with the public. In the academic literature on social movements, this shift is described as the rise of “chequebook participation”, as the quality of the engagement between organisation and member is changed, and the organisations morph into “protest businesses”, with strong management structures and, increasingly, targets for growth. The transaction model of public engagement has worked for fundraising, but we argue it has played into the Live Aid legacy, with its emphasis on the power of giving, and little else. A quick look at the communications strategies adopted by the sector shows that, in order to achieve the same or greater levels of donation, the content of the material has got harder, more heart-rending, and with less context. It is fair to ask where campaigns and fundraising will go next to keep income rising. Make Poverty History provided an opportunity to break out of the transaction frame. By rallying around the call for “justice not charity”, it attempted to disrupt the stubborn perception that “all we can do is give money”. Yet, as it turned out, the transaction frame proved too strong. In focus groups we ran around the event, the public repeatedly stated that it must be raising money, from all those wristbands and text messages. When in the end, Live8 became the finale to the activity around the G8, the public’s certainty about the transactional model was confirmed (“Live8 was the event, ‘Make Poverty History’ was the slogan” said one respondent). Inadvertently, MPH had reinforced the Live Aid legacy. It is our contention that it is time to have another go at breaking that legacy, once and for all. We have marshalled a body of theoretical and empirical evidence around values and frames, which we use as lenses through which to see the problem of public engagement. Through these lenses we also point to solutions, for ways out of this stalemate in public engagement. We do not dictate the solutions though, as it is critical that the development sector comes together to work them out for themselves, in collaboration. Whatever the new frames for global development are, they will need to work for all organisations. Most obviously, the frames we find will need to enable NGOs to keep raising the revenue they need now, but without jeopardising public engagement over the longer term. Happily, we think there are solutions out there: at community level, in faith groups, in academic thought, and in development as it is taking place in the global south (not least through south-south partnerships). All this amounts to a big change in how NGOs pursue their missions to end global poverty – from how they draft their business plans, to how they fundraise, campaign, or work with their volunteers. Most strikingly, it suggests they should frame their messages differently; seen from this perspective, “charity” “aid” and “development” are all problematic terms. The findings in the report are not new. But the quest for positive frames to re-engage the public in global poverty will take us in new directions. If all this strikes a chord with you, we recommend you read the report, and then think about how you can get involved in this new agenda. And let us know what you think below – what do you see as the problems of a transaction model of aid and the Live Aid Legacy? What new strategies of campaigning and communication might motivate people to have a deeper, more meaningful engagement than simply signing a cheque – and what implications might that have for the sector? • Andrew Darnton is an independent researcher, and lead author of Finding Frames Aid Live 8 Live Aid guardian.co.uk
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Taxi driver Christopher Halliwell remanded in custody on charge of killing 22-year-old Swindon woman A man has been appeared in court charged with the murder of Sian O’Callaghan. Christopher Halliwell, 47, of Swindon, Wiltshire, spoke only to confirm his name and address when he appeared at the town’s magistrates court. He is accused of killing the 22-year-old personal assistant, who disappeared in the early hours of Saturday 19 March after a night out with friends. Her body was found close to the Uffington white horse in Oxfordshire, 15 miles from her home in Swindon. Halliwell showed no emotion as the murder charge was read out. Magistrates remanded him in custody until 30 March, when he will appear at Bristol crown court. Earlier, a group of around 50 people surrounded the police van taking him to court. There was a further outburst from the crowd in the public gallery as he was taken down from the dock. Crime guardian.co.uk
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More than 200 people arrested in connection with disorder that followed largely peaceful demonstration on Saturday Police have charged 149 people with various offences in connection with the disorder that followed the peaceful protest by hundreds of thousands of people against the government’s spending cuts at the weekend. Approximately 201 people were arrested after trouble flared late in the afternoon after the demonstration in central London on Saturday. A Metropolitan police spokesman said officers arrested 145 people in connection with the incident at the Fortnum & Mason store in Piccadilly. One hundred and thirty-eight have been charged with aggravated trespass and bailed to appear at City of Westminster magistrates court on various dates from 9 May. The remaining seven have been bailed pending further inquiries. Two other people are due before the same court on Monday – one charged with possession of an offensive weapon and another charged with violent disorder and assault on a police officer. Seven others were charged and bailed to appear at the same court from 9 May: one was charged under section four of the Public Order Act, another with being drunk and disorderly, two with assault on a police officer and three with criminal damage. Omar Ibrahim, 31, of Glasgow Road, Baillieston, Glasgow, was charged with violent disorder and assault on police outside Topshop in Oxford Street. He was bailed to appear at City of Westminster magistrates court in May. A 17-year-old from Manchester will face charges of possessing an offensive weapon in a public place and going equipped for criminal damage. He was bailed to appear at west London youth court on 4 April. Three people were cautioned for criminal damage. Two were released with no further action, while 47 have been bailed to return to various London police stations over the coming few days and weeks, the force said. Commander Bob Broadhurst, who led the Met police operation, said the groups “could not have been more markedly different” from the TUC march, which was “overwhelmingly peaceful and good humoured”. He revealed that the activists had developed their tactics to avoid police by keeping mobile, using small alleyways and covering their faces. “Their intent appeared to be causing havoc, with no concern at all for those people in central London they were putting in danger. “Officers came under attack, fires were set and shops attacked,” he said. Union leaders have vowed to continue campaigning against the cuts amid mounting anger at clashes with police and damage to stores and other buildings during the demonstration. Unofficial estimates put the numbers taking part in the earlier protest at nearly 500,000, with tens of thousands of people still joining the march through central London as a rally in Hyde Park got under way. A group wearing scarves to hide their faces started attacking shops and banks well away from the march, causing damage and clashing with some of the 4,500 police on duty. The Metropolitan police is reviewing evidence collected from CCTV cameras and police officers. A cleanup operation was launched in the wake of the disorder. The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, said the so-called March for the Alternative exceeded expectations, with nurses, teachers, council staff, NHS workers, other public sector employees, pensioners, students and other campaign groups taking part in the biggest union-organised protest for a generation. “It now looks like close to half a million people came to London to express their peaceful but powerful opposition to the government’s deep, rapid and unfair spending cuts. “We are proud of the way that we organised our march and the way that our stewards helped ensure a good-natured and friendly event. “Of course we condemn the small numbers who came looking for violence but we will not allow their actions away from our event to detract from our campaign. “With the budget a damp squib, the economy faltering and the NHS reforms becoming more unpopular each and every day, marchers will have returned home determined to step up their democratic campaign against policies that neither government party put before the electorate at the last election.” The leader of the GMB, Paul Kenny, said the local elections on 5 May should be a referendum on the government’s economic and social policies. A police spokesman said there were 84 injuries reported during the protests, including at least 31 police, with 11 officers requiring hospital treatment. The injuries were described as “relatively minor”, including cuts and bruises, suspected whiplash and a possible broken collar bone. Unions are planning fresh campaigns in the coming days against cuts in the NHS and considering co-ordinated industrial action. Public sector cuts Protest TUC Trade unions Police London guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Brit Hume: If the Health Care Law Had Incorporated Some Republican Ideas, They’d Have Voted for It
March 27, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media While discussing one year after the passage of The Affordable Care Act, whether most Americans support the law or not, Brit Hume throws this bit of nonsense out there: HUME: What I would say about this is, think how different this would be now had the president and the Democrats in Congress been willing to incorporate some Republican ideas; a serious attempt at tort reform for example. He would have gotten I think not only much of what, he, the president wanted, Republicans would have gotten some of they wanted. A bunch of them would have voted for it. This notion that it’s a partisan bill would be gone and the whole picture would look different right now from the way it does. I actually in my life have never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen a bill with this much consequence rammed through by one party alone. And it raised questions about the legitimacy of the measure from the start and those questions persist today. And that is why, even with the polls that you and Juan cited and there are others that show something quite different, the thing remains up in the air and I think Bill is right in thinking that it will be a burden to this presidency. What fantasy world is Hume living in? Does he really think we’re supposed to believe that Republicans were ever going to vote for that bill, no matter how many of their ideas were incorporated into it? This is the party of Jim DeMint who said he wanted the stall the bill being passed for as long as possible because he wanted it to be Obama’s “Waterloo” that John wrote about here — SC’s Jim DeMint would rather bring pain to President Obama than help the American people . And would someone please explain to me what good it did to do all that wrangling and deal making with Olympia Snowe that Susie wrote about here ? As Jon Perr pointed out in this post, bipartisanship is dead, “but it is the Republican Party which killed it.” — Bipartisanship’s Willing Executioners : Republicans win, even when they lose. That appears to be the conventional wisdom after the Democrats’ crucial victory in the Senate health care vote this weekend. In its wake, media outlets gave credence to John McCain’s assertion that thanks to President Obama, Washington is “more partisan” and “more bitterly divided than it’s been.” That followed the pronouncement of CNN’s supposedly moderate Republican analyst David Gergen , who proclaimed the party line vote “a tragedy” since it did not garner a “super majority,” a result for which “blame is pretty evenly divided.” To be sure, McCain and Gergen are right that bipartisanship is dead. But it is the Republican Party which killed it . The numbers don’t lie. For over a generation, Democrats have acquiesced in the GOP’s budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while Republicans instead presented a unified rejectionist front on the economic programs of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Worse still, the Republicans’ record-breaking use of the filibuster since being relegated to the minority in 2006 has made the 60 vote threshold a permanent fixture of the Senate. As for Gergen’s nostalgia for the political parties that passed Social Security and Medicare with bipartisan majorities, they simply don’t exist anymore. Sadly, President Obama’s almost pathological obsession with bipartisan consensus only served to produce more political masochism when it came to this month’s health care votes. In the House , exactly one Republican voted for a health care reform bill which passed by a 220-215 margin. Contrary to John McCain’s mythology that in the Senate, there had been “no effort that I know of — of serious across the table negotiations,” Obama repeatedly reached out to GOP Senators like Olympia Snowe and left the writing of the Senate health bill to the bipartisan ” Gang of Six .” For that, President Obama only got what Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called a ” holy war ” – and zero Republican votes. And as Rachel Maddow pointed out last year, Republicans just loved the individual mandate, before they decided they were against it because a Democrat proposed it — Republicans Frivolous Lawsuits: They Loved the Mandate Before Calling it Unconstitutional . This is the Republicans idea of “bipartisanship” that Karoli reminded us of last December — Mitch McConnell Will Work With President Obama to do Republican Things . But Brit Hume expects us to believe that if they’d just gotten some of that tort reform Republicans wanted into the health care bill, they’d all have been voting for it in droves. Sure Brit, when pigs fly.
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Harry Wesley Coover Jr created the glue by accident while working for Tennessee Eastman Company Harry Wesley Coover Jr, known as the inventor of Super Glue, has died at his home in Kingsport, Tennessee, aged 94. Coover was working for Tennessee Eastman Company when an accident resulted in the creation of cyanoacrylate – better known as Super Glue – according to his grandson, Adam Paul of South Carolina. An assistant was distressed that some new refractometer prisms were ruined when they were glued together, marking the invention of the popular adhesive. The US president, Barack Obama, honoured Coover in 2010 with the National Medal of Science. Coover was born in Newark, Delaware. He received a degree in chemistry from Hobart College in New York before getting a master’s degree and PhD from Cornell. He worked his way up to become vice president of the chemical division for development at Eastman Kodak. Coover and the team of chemists he worked with became prolific patent holders, achieving more than 460. The work included polymers, organophosphate chemistry, the gasification of coal and of course, cyanoacrylate. Coover also had a part in early US television history, appearing with Garry Moore on the game show I’ve Got a Secret. Moore, the show’s host, and Coover were hung in the air on bars that were stuck to metal supports with a single drop of his glue during a live television broadcast. The Industrial Research Institute, for which he served as president in 1982, honoured Coover with a gold medal and the US Patent Office inducted him into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in 2004. United States guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed Sunday that the intervention in Libya was riddled with “confusion,” unlike the invasion of Afghanistan. “If you go into something with confusion and ambiguity, and we have heard four or five different explanations of why we’re there, that is the root of the problem,” he told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “The confusion that comes from that. Confusion about what the mission is. Confusion about who the rebels are. Confusion about whether or not Gaddafi should be left in power. Confusion about what the command and control should be.” “It seems to me [in the Afghanistan invasion], we proceeded in a very orderly way. President Bush made a decision that America had been attacked. That was unacceptable. We were going after al Qaeda and remove the Taliban. He set that as the mission and put together a coalition to take on that mission. That’s exactly the way it should be done.” Tapper didn’t follow up with Rumsfeld about confusion that took place during the Iraq war.
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• Funding body ‘spending far too much on itself’ • Report comes at start of crucial week for the arts The Arts Council in England has been told to sell works from its art collection – which includes masterpieces by Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Mark Wallinger and Damien Hirst – in a highly critical report. In what is to be a crucial week for the arts – English cultural organisations will be told on Wednesday how much public money they will receive from the Arts Council – the report from the parliamentary select committee on culture criticises the funding body for “spending far too much on itself”. The MPs on the committee, chaired by Tory John Whittingdale, condemn a “gross waste of public money” and “failure of leadership” over the body’s conduct in relation to the Public, the West Bromwich gallery that cost £52m to build but went into administration before it opened. The report also deeply criticises ministers’ “disturbing modus operandi” in abruptly abolishing a number of cultural bodies, notably the UK Film Council. That episode was “handled very badly by the government”, says the report. “It is extremely regrettable that a film-maker of the stature of Tim Bevan has, as a result, decided to take no further part in government-sponsored initiatives.” Bevan, the co-founder of Working Title and co-producer of films such as Fargo and Four Weddings and a Funeral, chaired the UK Film Council at the time of its abolition. The Arts Council hit back at the report, with a spokesman calling its findings out of date and criticising the choice of witnesses called to give evidence, saying the committee would have “benefited from a wider range of viewpoints”. She defended the organisation’s record, saying, “The Public is old news and is not representative of the Arts Council’s investments in capital projects.” And she poured cold water on the recommendation that the council gets rid of artworks: “Selling off works of art from the Arts Council collection is also not a sensible solution to the current budget cuts.” The collection, now containing 7,500 works, was founded in 1946 to buy modern and contemporary art to lend to public galleries and museums nationwide. It also organises touring exhibitions, such as that devoted to Anish Kapoor now on in Manchester. Works from the collection have never been sold before. Leading figures in the arts defended the council’s record. Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, said the body “has our confidence” and Anthony Sargent, general director of the Sage arts venue in Gateshead, called it a “transformed institution”. On top of recommending the council sell, or “strategically deaccession”, artworks to make it more financially sustainable, the report suggests amalgamating the art collections of the organisation with those of the government and the British Council. The committee also said it was not convinced there was a need for so many symphony orchestras to receive funding from the council and the BBC; claimed heritage had been underfunded compared with the arts; and expressed concern at the deep level of cuts to funding for culture proposed by some local councils. The arts world is waiting anxiously for the results of public funding applications, which are due to drop into email inboxes up and down England between 7.30am and 9.30am on Wednesday. Grant applications have been made by 1,300 organisations; almost half will be unsuccessful. The Arts Council received a 29.6% cut in its grant-in-aid from central government at the last comprehensive spending review, making heavy cuts inevitable, although the council has promised not to “salami-slice” and to protect excellent organisations from the deepest cuts. The Arts Council, which cut its running costs by 15% in a restructuring completed in April 2010, has been told by the government to cut its running costs again, this time by 50%, with only 15% of the cuts being passed to the “front line”. Senior figures in the arts defended the council’s recent record. “The process has been as good as it could have been,” said Hytner. He said many unsuccessful applicants would be “hugely aggrieved”, but added: “I don’t see how it can be avoided.” Director Sir Richard Eyre said Arts Council chief executive Alan Davey was “a good thing” and said the body had been put in a “hellish position” because of overall cuts from central government. Sargent said” “Three years ago, the council was a disappointing laughing stock. I am not saying it’s perfect, but as far as they can, Davey and [the body's chair] Liz Forgan have played a difficult hand with real skill.” A spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said a formal government response would be published in due course. Main points • Arts Council England has been “spending far too much on itself” • ACE “played a major role in the gross waste of public money” on the Public, West Bromwich • “Strategic deaccessioning” – ie, selling of artworks – from the Arts Council Collection is advised • The committee was “disturbed” by the number of local authorities proposing substantial cuts to arts • Small arts organisations are at greater risk from funding cuts than large ones, a matter of “great concern” • Committee “not convinced” there is a need for so many subsidised orchestras • Abolition of the UK Film Council was “handled very badly by the government”. Similar “disturbing modus operandi” followed for other abruptly axed cultural bodies • Heritage “suffered disproportionately” in funding cuts compared with arts Arts funding Art Charlotte Higgins guardian.co.uk
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