‘Priorities for culture’: a pioneer Welsh Government strategy?

The Welsh Government’s just produced another document on culture.  This one has the snappy title Priorities for culture.  In case you’re interested, there are three priorities: ‘culture brings people together’, ‘celebrating Wales as a nation of culture’ and ‘culture is resilient and sustainable.’  I can already hear you thinking: ‘but two of these aren’t priorities, they’re just statements or assertions, aren’t they’?  Or, ‘between them they seem to cover most of the territory: what on earth isn’t a priority?’

If you’re already a sceptic, read on.  This is a document that might have been written twenty years ago.  It certainly contains barrow-loads of the politician/civil service jargon that was around then.  Unless you’re the sort of reader who salivates at the mention of ‘robust infrastructure’, ‘community-driven initiatives’, ‘leveraged to inspire creativity’ and ‘deep and broad cultural and creative offers’, you risk not surviving to read to the final page – even if there are only eighteen pages in all.

I did struggle through to p.18.  But as I approached the appendix, ‘Priorities for culture and the National Well-being Indicators’, a terrible thought occurred to me – that the entire document had been written by an artificial intelligence program.  ChatGPT and other conversational chatboxes are like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote.  What they do is cannibalise words and ideas from the mountains of digital fodder loaded into their gaping jaws, and then spew out on the carpet some chewed-up, plausible nonsense.  Had the particular AI machine used by the Welsh Government in this case, I wondered, had fed the contents of dozens of ‘cultural strategies’ produced over the years, and given the instruction, ‘Please give me a mash-up, in no more than eighteen pages, of everything you can think of, and label it Priorities for culture’?

The more I thought about this idea, the more convincing it seemed.  There didn’t seem to be much, if anything, in the document that might have been written by a human.  (One exception might be the foreword, attributed to Jack Sargeant AS, the Minister for Culture – though I wouldn’t swear that the good Jack had done more than sign it.)  Could Priorities for culture possibly be a pioneer: the very first AI-generated Welsh Government public document?

So much for the language.  Since only bureaucrats, professionals and policy geeks are likely to read the document, that hardly matters.  But what about the content?  Well, it struck me as entirely unexceptional and unsurprising.  There are nods in all directions: to cultural rights, the importance of place and of the Welsh language, promoting culture, within and outside Wales, collaboration between cultural bodies, operating in a digital environment, and so on.  Almost nothing struck me as new, almost everything seemed unremarkable.

What is completely remarkable is what isn’t in the document.  Two words buried in the introduction betray this elephant-sized omission: ‘Our ambition remains that culture in Wales will be thriving, properly resourced, with a long‑term, strategic plan for investment’ [my italics].

Anyone reading Priorities for culture in a vacuum could be forgiven for thinking the culture and the arts in Wales are in blooming good health.  Whereas the truth is that there’s isn’t a single corner of the sector that isn’t in some kind of emergency, after ten to fifteen years of almost continuous cuts in government expenditure. 

The list is a long and woeful one.  National Theatre Wales was abolished, and nothing replaced it until Michael Sheen stepped in to fund some performances.  Welsh National Opera, has slashed its staff and activities and is in near-permanent crisis, its international reputation badly damaged.  The Arts Council and the Books Council can no longer adequately support their clients.  The National Museum and National Library are shadows of what they once were, and the Museum has been reduced to charging visitors at Big Pit.  The Culture Committee of the Senedd revealed in January that Wales spends less per head on cultural services than any country in Europe, with the single exception of Greece.

There’s not a whisper about any of this in Priorities for culture.  Two thoughts occur to me about the silence.  The first is that it’s hard to take the document as anything other than a string of meaningless words, quite detached from the reality of things on the ground.  The second is that it suggests that the current Welsh Government, as I’ve argued elsewhere, simply doesn’t understand the value of arts and culture enough to want to support them in any positive way, and is content to see them declining towards extinction.

The Government will reply that it found £4.4m of extra grant in February in response to the cries of pain from the sector.  But that announcement, though welcome, had the whiff of ‘let’s get them off our back’, rather than a genuine change of heart.  Distributed thinly across the sector, it will do little to undo years of underfunding.  Perhaps we’ll have to wait for a change of government before there’ll be serious change for the better.