Arts Council Blasted for Funding ‘Woke’ Projects While Traditional Museums Close

Arts Council England has been accused of splashing taxpayers’ cash on ‘woke’ projects while museums across the UK are closing their doors. The Mail has more:

Recent awards by the organisation – which dishes out more than £840 million a year in taxpayer cash and the National Lottery  – included £100,000 for the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield in June, which featured a flag-making workshop “exploring identity, protest and belonging”.

The organisers of the workshop said that its purpose was to push back against public displays of England’s national flag, which has been condemned by Left-wing groups as indicative of racism and xenophobia rather than patriotism. The organisers said: “Responding to the divisive use of the St George’s flag, this project reclaims public space with inclusive narratives.”

The festival also featured The Bull And The Moon, a dance show for children aged three and over about ‘Lolo’, a Spanish bull who dreams of becoming ‘Lola’, a flamenco-dancing cow, in a story its makers billed as a “celebration of gender diversity” and being oneself.

Other recipients of Arts Council England largesse included £29,950 to The Bitten Peach Ltd, which calls itself the UK’s only queer, pan-Asian cabaret collective: its shows have featured puppets, whips and a poppadom-eating contest. 

Curl Girl Productions received £35,434 for Panjabi Princesses, about two Queer Panjabi princesses, while playwright Aisha Zia was awarded £32,547 for Refugee! – a theatre production in which characters uncover evidence of the Government’s “complicity” in war crimes.

A gay retelling of Romeo and Juliet in which Shakespeare’s hero falls for a Muslim man named Mohammed at a rave in Croydon has secured £30,807 in taxpayer funding after being deemed “culturally significant”. …

The Council says it is “the national development agency for museums in England… to help develop museums for as many people as possible across the country”.

But a total of 16 museums across the UK were forced to close in the same 12-month period that those grants were awarded.

These included the RAF Signals Museum, which told the history of RAF signals and communications equipment from the First World War to modern times.

Others which shut their doors included Durham Museum, which closed in 2024 after it could not meet the cost of repairs to the building, Llancaiach Fawr Living History Museum in South Wales, Westbury Manor Museum in Hampshire and Alyth Museum in Perthshire, which told the story of the town through local industries such as farming and weaving and celebrated its working-class culture.

Worth reading in full.