Letter: Save the Arts

Save the Arts

Since everyone is rightly concerned to maintain public confidence in the National Lottery, perhaps the spotlight can be turned onto one of its least understood side-effects. I refer to the unwise decision that Millennium Commission grants should be subject to the recipients obtaining matching funds.

Aneurin Bevan, I think, once remarked that this country was made of coal, and surrounded by fish; and that it took an organising genius of the first order to create a shortage of both simultaneously. No doubt it is the same organising genius which has brought the arts the biggest bonanza of this century, while ensuring that it is accompanied by the worst financial famine for museums and art galleries (and Arts Council clients in general) that they have known in modern times.

A major cause of this is the insistence that successful applicants get matching funds which, when aggregated throughout the country, has put an intolerable strain on private-sector funding. If we are now invited to look once more at the whole operation of the Lottery phenomenon (report, 5 February), it is urgent that the Secretary of State consider removing this unachievable and damaging clause from all existing contracts.

JOHN LETTS

Chairman

The Museums Action Movement

London SW4