Oliver Dowden wrote to Arts Council England about their approach to issues of contested heritage being ‘consistent with the government’s position’. Photograph: Mark Thomas/REX/Shutterstock Keep rightwing politics out of arts funding Granville Williams abhors the threats to institutions over research into slavery, while Christopher Gordon writes that Arts Council England has presided over a climate of fear

The mindset and language of Tory politicians discussing broadcasting and the arts is disturbing. Charlotte Higgins highlights the letter which the former culture secretary Oliver Dowden wrote to Arts Council England and other bodies about their approach to issues of contested heritage being “consistent with the government’s position” (An atmosphere of threat lingers over the arts – and it’s created by the government, 6 December).

Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January: “We won’t allow people to censor our past.” A month later Dowden said: “Purging uncomfortable elements of our past does nothing but damage our understanding of it.”

Initiatives such as the National Trust’s Colonial Countryside have been a particular focus for their criticism. But it is grotesque to suggest that historical research that helps us to understand the links between British country houses and slavery is about “purging” or “censoring”. Rather, it deepens our understanding – but Dowden threatened to ban the use of public funds for Colonial Countryside and suggested the National Trust was violating Charity Commission rules.

Incidentally, a new chair of the Charity Commission has still to be announced by the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries. Let’s hope we haven’t had the kind of overt political interference in this appointment as we had with the Ofcom chair fiasco.

Granville Williams

Upton, West Yorkshire

• Charlotte Higgins is right to fear the growing atmosphere of threat to public funding of the arts. However, this has been latent for longer than is perhaps acknowledged. Raymond Williams in 1979 had already redescribed the “arm’s length principle” as “wrist’s length” in a Political Quarterly article recording his experience as vice-chairman of the Arts Council.

Over recent decades, Arts Council England itself has presided over a climate of fear. Central government has always been there, hovering just out of sight – sometimes benignly, sometimes with menace. One longer-term threat is that, after local authority capacity in arts support has been all but eroded over the past 10 years, England’s massively overcentralised arts funding agency has a monopoly over both Treasury and lottery funding allocations.

Christopher Gordon

Chief executive, English regional arts boards consortium, 1987-2000

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Source: The Guardian

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