Another day, another opinion on what’s wrong with the arts. This week we’ve got a report, ‘Class Ceiling’, by Manchester University Chancellor Nazir Afzal and retired NEU official Avis Gilmore. The paper is billed as ‘A Review of Working Class Participation in the Arts Across Greater Manchester’, and sees the difficulty with the arts as being, besides the perennial one of lack of money, one of equality of access for the working class. It says that low pay, the absence of established networks and the lack of a career structure make it too difficult for those without money or connections to make it into the arts, or to see their ‘lived experience’ in them.

To deal with these problems it makes some recommendations. It would like to see the Equality Act supplemented to make class discrimination illegal; the publication of all kinds of socio-economic data; all jobs to be formally advertised with structured interviews; a complete ban on informal hiring; permanent advisory panels representing working class creatives; and a publicly paid Class Champion. These ideas are well-meaning. But will they work?

For one thing, it........

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