Of all the fine contributions to “How to fix a nation” (Cover Story, 21 June), Anthony Seldon’s had me banging the table in agreement. It’s to the credit of the New Statesman that it, among a small chorus of progressive thinking, has sustained a line of resistance throughout what has felt like a long cultural retreat since Thatcher. As art, sport and creativity have been starved at schools, as they have been in the wider community, new, authentic voices expressing the changes in our lived experiences have been diminished. This has allowed an emaciating, corporate, transactional and constitutionally traditional world-view to dominate, and left a culturally fragmented UK with a muted, confused view of itself.
To fix this, the nation would need the means to see itself, and to draw meaning from change and difference – best done through art, sport and creativity. As urgent as economic and constitutional change is, there is also the need to find as radically different a framework to revive and reinvent the nation’s cultural space, so as to better lead out “what lies within”.
Graham Johnston, Wymondham, Norfolk
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