UK’S CULTURE CHIEF RESPONDS TO ANGRY ARTS LEADERS

Tessa Jowell, the UK’s Secretary of State for Culture, has pledged that there will be no return to the stop-start funding that disrupted the arts under the Tories as long as Labour is in power, Louise Jury reports in The Independent. Responding to angry concerns recently expressed by cultural leaders, Jowell strongly defended the Government’s record of increasing spending on the arts by 60 per cent in the past six years. “You would have to be living in a parallel universe to say that is going back to the bad old days. It’s just a denial of reality,” she said yesterday.