ON March 7, the BBC announced their New Strategy for Classical Music. Following a year of review, which they say explores the culture sector as a whole, while investigating the BBC’s role within it, the new strategy supposedly will “strengthen its public purpose for classical music, delivering the best music to a wider audience, with a significant new investment in music education”.

The five key points of this strategy are: 

Creating “agile” ensembles
Reinforcing the distinctiveness of the BBC’s five unique orchestras 
Doubling funding for music education
Creating a single digital home
Closing the BBC singers to “invest more widely in the future of choral singing across the UK”

Like all public announcements of this nature, the surface level rarely appears hostile – usually overusing dynamic phrases to excite and expand the potential of the creative sector. 

However, when you look behind the curtain, the “agile” ensembles will come out of redundancies within the BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. 

So “agile” in this instance only means more freelancers, and a less unionised workforce that will struggle to defend itself from such attacks on the workplace. 

“Reinforcing distinctiveness” like many neoliberal buzzwords, could mean many things, but it is apparent that this is being used as a stick to beat us into submission.

Doubling funding for music education on the surface sounds like a wonderful thing. 

However, if we look at how the recent Arts Council England’s announcement has treated music education, the reality we are being presented with is the BBC and state funded organisations carrying the slack in music education which the British government has failed to deliver. 

Ultimately, this is aimed to absolve them of their responsibility to provide all people of Britain a substantial and varied education which not only prepares people for life, but rounds them off as citizens with a rich and varied understanding of the world. 

Creating a single digital home, is probably the least problematic element, as music should be easy to find and as long as this functions well it will be a helpful resource. However, with all the cuts happening, what on Earth will they fill this digital space with? 

But the closure of the BBC Singers is a heinous act of cultural vandalism. 

In Britain, most of our choirs, attached to orchestras, are amateurs or semi-professional. The BBC Singers were the exception. 

It would be easy to proclaim the brilliance of the BBC Singers, their musicality, individuality, and many other characteristics which are very true of the ensemble. 

However, they were a stable and fully professional choir, they had the financial support to be able to be as brilliant as they were, and deliver outstanding music easily because economic difficulties did not limit the potential of the ensemble. Prior to these cuts, the only limitation of the BBC Singers was that they were a single ensemble. Whereas now, much like the destruction of ENO or Glyndebourne and WNO’s touring budget, we are simply losing access to a valuable cornerstone of our cultural landscape. 

In the week since the announcement, it has come to light that the BBC are looking for a “coronation choir”. This is targeted predominantly at amateurs, which is particularly sinister. While there is a lot of love in amateur ensembles, to completely gut a choir of paid workers and replace them with volunteers is the most blatant form of scab work. 

It has barely been four months since the last round of cuts from Arts Council England. The professional landscape is currently in a horrendous situation. Unionised workplaces have become a fanciful dream, the notion of working-class people with easy access to art has disappeared like sugar in tea, and it appears those in charge of what limited cultural provision we have access to simply hate art. 

The BBC should be acting like a service, because that is what it is, no matter how much the BBC leadership may despise being in service to plebs and the rest of the wretched people of this country. 

For the musical elements in the BBC, that should mean ensembles that have a safety net being able to try new things without the pressure of needing to turn a profit, but no longer being big enough to survive another year. It should be remembered that such groups enrich numerous other corners of the BBC – be it music in TV shows or other wonderful outlets.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Morning Star where I highlighted how the biggest problem Britain, as Brexit drew near, was the lack of infrastructure to support artists and musicians within our borders. Following Brexit, this has become painfully clear. Now the few stable institutions we have are being hacked and slashed, despite all the upbeat talk of “agility” and “championing the distinctive”. 

Our cultural landscape is in a terrible state, and we need the trade union movement, and the progressive movement as a whole, to unify around this. 

The workers within these spheres have already spoken up – three open letters have been circulated, one by all the conductors of the BBC ensembles (who are normally required to remain “neutral”), one by numerous high-profile singers comprising individuals like Sir Bryn Terfel and Dame Sarah Connolly, and the last and largest by James Weeks which has seen hundreds of composers from across the globe decrying this vandalism. 

There is a fight on our hands. 

Working musicians are raising their voices to fight back, while the Tory Party and its lackeys in the BBC and ACE drain us of inspiration and resources. Trade unionists and progressive forces in Britain have a choice. Should we put up with such deprivation, can we, collectively, demand our bread and roses.