[color=#333333][font=Times]"Arts Council England gives London's Southbank Centre £20,000,000 in block funding each year (which means they can spend it on what they like without much in the way of detailed accountability). Some of ACE's funding comes from you, the tax-payer, which makes it quite likely that, when you last visited Royal Festival Hall and took a sh*t, you wiped your arse with toilet roll that you helped pay for. And The Barbican? Only £583,000 in funding in 2013, but that's topped up by £19,800,000 from the City of London. Forty million for two arts centres. What do Le Pub in Newport or Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff get? f***-all. Why can't we take a million each off Southbank and Barbican, stick it in a fund which small venues could apply to, up to a maximum of twenty grand per venue, then we could transform one hundred small UK venues in one move. We could create a world-class small venue circuit. We could be the best. The Southbank is a charity too. Perhaps it could start being a bit more f***ing charitable.
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[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][color=#333333][size=4]This a tired argument, never to be resolved. It cuts across all art forms - [i]The Arts Council aren't interested[/i]. It doesn't serve their controlling view of culture (even though it's paid for by you and I) to NOT give vast amounts of subsidy to needy over priced middle class Metropolitan bastions of high culture.[/size][/color][/font]