General Election 2015: Together, politics and culture protect the UK from deadly intolerance

The head of the Southbank Centre explains why the country will be served better by a parliament that appreciates the power of a creative population

Culture club: Cultural figures, including Jude Kelly (back row, centre) demonstrate in the Great Court at the British Museum in 2010 (Getty Images)

Last week I got a shocking and frightening phone call. A woman like myself, Sabeen Mahmud, who ran an arts centre in Karachi that I visited last month, had been shot five times by extremists for presenting a challenging talks programme about modern Pakistan. She died instantly.

At Southbank Centre we are reaching the finale of our Changing Britain festival. We have looked back over the politics, cultural activities and events that have shaped us as a nation from the dramatic election of 1945 to the casting of our vote this week. Sabeen’s assassination was a stark reminder that none of us at Southbank Centre had to consider our personal safety when planning debates about the legacies of politicians, the rise of alternative comedy or the changing nature of sexual education. None of us had to fear reprisal for glorying in free speech and democratic discussion while we unpicked the troubled history of union power.

We can vote for whom we choose, and in our cultural spaces we can be critical, satirical and as irreverent as we see fit. We must never squander that freedom through apathy or timidity.

Feverish election rhetoric would suggest that our way of life and sense of identity rests on which party we favour. But when we look back over the 70 years of post-war Britain, and its broadly liberal personality, it’s clear that the trends, events and milestones of the cultural landscape did just as much to determine our national attitudes and actions as mainstream politics.

And, arguably, the fact that the UK maintains a place on the world stage as an imaginative and broad-minded land owes as much to the vast energy and spirit of our creative life as it does to our place at tables of business, finance or war. So politicians count a great deal, but they aren’t the only shaper of worlds by any means.

Clapton drunkenly declared his admiration of Enoch Powell (Getty) (Getty Images)

When Eric Clapton made a drunken declaration of support for former Conservative minister Enoch Powell (known for his anti-immigration Rivers of Blood speech) at a concert in Birmingham, the guitarist told the crowd that England had “become overcrowded” and that they should vote for Powell to stop Britain from becoming “a black colony”. (Clapton later claimed he was only joking and knows nothing about politics). There followed the famous Rock against Racism concert in East London, and a generation of young music lovers were inducted into the consciousness of human rights.

In Changing Britain we’ve examined other pivotal cultural moments such as when That Was The Week That Was hit the screens and pronounced the end of the prim Fifties; when Cathy Come Home on TV in 1966 triggered a nationwide debate on homelessness; and how Monty Python’s “Lumberjack” song in 1974 debunked an over-reverent attitude to polite society. The government’s 1980 pamphlet Protect and Survive, about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, was so effectively chastised in Raymond Briggs’s haunting When the Wind Blows in 1982 that the CND movement had a new lease of life. Try as Parliament did to strengthen Section 28 of the Local Government Act in 1982 – banning the promotion or teaching of homosexuality – the nation voted instead for Michael Cashman’s portrayal of Colin Russell, a gay character on EastEnders, and even accepted the first soap opera gay kiss with reasonable equanimity. By the late 1990s Russell T Davies’ Queer as Folk was a smash hit and politicians led by Chris Smith, the then Culture Secretary, were also allowed to be proud to be gay. These events were part of a shift in public opinion that led up to the Equal Marriage Act that we saw last year.

There are so many examples of politics expressing fear or disapproval and popular culture laughing those fears away; Love thy Neighbour, The Kumars at No 42 and Till Death Do Us Part all undermine prejudice and remind us how similar we are to each other.

So if culture is such a powerful influence on society does it really matter if some of us don’t vote? Absolutely. We fought to get democracy, we’ve fought to keep it and we endanger those rights if we just duck out of participating. Culture can comment, agitate, model new ideas and strengthen alternative voices but you still need housing policies, a national budget and health care and the best way to craft a better world is to be involved in the debate. And because a cultural space like Southbank Centre has no agenda other than to encourage people to use their imagination to make a better world we are able to host ecumenical debates on all aspects of our political and social history as a way of deepening a commitment to participating in the world we’re part of. Which includes voting – for whatever party.

But for culture to remain an inquisitive, stimulating force, which helps people process events and explore complex situations, then politicians need to be equally determined to support the healthy growth of a rich artistic life. They need to stop fearing that the public will see the arts as an indulgence or a luxury if they show enthusiasm for investing in them. And they need to believe that the arts has a unique ability to get people to care about other people’s lives. And it’s that ability to care beyond just oneself that can help tackle our now widespread political disengagement.

In looking at all the manifestos of the main parties since 1945 it’s clear that in this election there is a marked change in the language used and the amount written about our cultural life.

Queer As Folk helped to change attitudes towards homosexuality (Channel 4)

There are now stated, detailed proposals to ensure that our creative life thrives. The cultural sector has also lobbied very hard for the arts to be fully included in all children’s educational life in order to give young people the tools of empathy, analysis, risk-taking and rigour that the artistic disciplines provide. And that’s still a campaign to be sustained in the coming years, whoever wins. But the main project for all of us is not just to ask politics what it can do for us in just a vested interest way but what we can do for politics? How can we ensure it remains relevant and connected to our lives? Culture has a strong role to play in this need to reinvigorate the political arena and our democracy will be safer for it. The cultural community has been determinedly cross-denominational and tried to engage with every party to encourage them to “vote for the arts”.

Whoever wins, this country will be served better by a parliament that fully appreciates the powerful and positive effect of a creatively confident population and shares a belief in cultural democracy. So my strongest conviction for any nation as we head for our photo-finish election night is that voting really matters, a multi-party country really matters and so does a powerful cultural life and that they are all inextricably linked.

Sabeen Mahmud was killed for daring to use her arts space to encourage open debate. At a session last week on rave culture in the 1980s a DJ on the panel said: “I’d look up from my decks and there were 4,000 people of all backgrounds, all shapes, all colours and I’d think ‘if they can dance together, they can live together’”. Tragically, our friends in Pakistan are increasingly prevented from dancing or living in peace. Let’s ensure that in the UK we support both culture and politics to protect us from that deadly intolerance.

Southbank Centre’s Changing Britain festival culminates on 9 May (southbankcentre.co.uk)