ABSTRACT
One of the justifications offered for the efforts of the heritage industry is that today has a responsibility to yesterday: to preserve it so that it may be handed on to tomorrow. The economic role of culture was similarly recognised in the report of a House of Commons select committee in 1982, which accepted without question that ‘the arts are a major industry in their own right. Until the 1980s the common consensus in Britain – though not in Continental Europe, where ministerial direction of subsidy is a matter of course – was that the arts had to be kept at some distance from political control. The Arts Council came into being in 1945, as part of the post-war Welfare State. The most important application of the arm’s length principle has been that of the Arts Council towards its own policies.
