Only in Britain could a government be so incompetent as to hold a festival centred around Brexit, that didn’t mention Brexit because the arty types organising it didn’t want it mentioned. A Brexit festival where the programme was almost completely dominated by the intellectual farts of art school space cadets and which cost £120 million and left very little to show for it.

It seems incredible doesn’t it that a government minister, in this case Oliver Dowden the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport at the time, could sign off on a festival whose organisers refused to mention what the whole festival was about, which in this case was supposedly Brexit. It might seem mad but this is what appears to have happened. He basically allowed himself to be bullied by the art establishment into not mentioning the very thing that the festival was supposed to be all about.

The idea of a festival of Brexit, maybe something that brought to mind the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the Festival of Britain in 1951 might have been a good idea. The various large exhibition venues that exist up and down the country such as the Excel Centre in East London or the Manchester Central Exhibition Centre and others could have put on events highlighting the very best of Britain, it’s industry, science, art and culture. It could have been a confidence boost for the nation and maybe an inspiration for the young. Unfortunately what we got was not that. Instead as Guido Fawkes points out what we got for our £120 million was this:

A grow-your-own food initiative taking place across Scotland – and reimagining harvest for the 21st century: £8 million.

• A garden of proportions (sic) taking over Birmingham city centre. A celebration of colour, beauty and natural diversity that ends with a spectacular party: £7.6 million.
• A multimedia installation in Paisley, Luton and Hull celebrating our connection to everything around us – past, present and future: £8.1 million.
• A multi-platform, multilingual story set in a possible future world of 2052: £6.3 million.
• A journey to explore the potential of your mind (on-line citizen science data collection): £8.6 million.
• Tour de Moon: A journey into the possibilities of tomorrow, live shows, nightlife, digital experiences and more created in collaboration with the Moon (sic): £7.3 million.

I must admit that none of what Guido has said was on offer really appeals to me and probably wouldn’t have appealed to many outside of the circle of the creators and their immediate friends and family. It certainly looks as if the taxpayer has been ripped off by the art establishment here. This looks to me like a much larger version of the various scandals that I’ve encountered re publicly funded art projects in local government. This scandal, which can happen almost anywhere where where there is a culture of profligacy on the part of the council or councillors who want to grandstand, usually involves artists who are friends of or favoured by certain councillors or council officers ending up with a lot of money for providing art that doesn’t really move or enchant those who have the misfortune to have to pay for it.

According to Guido who has seen and examined the report into this massive pit of public sector waste the footfall of this series of events and artworks was pretty poor. Guido said that the report said that ‘the target for audience engagement was 9.2 million people under the base case’. In other words 9.2 million less people engaged with these events and artworks than the organisers expected them to. What makes it worse is that it is not only the wet remainer Oliver Dowden who is at fault here in signing off this spending and having the festival extremely poorly managed by DCMS, but also to blame are the other government departments such as the Cabinet Office and the Treasury who jointly with the DCMS sat on the management board for the festival. They also allowed masses of public money to be spent on stuff that was quite frankly shit.

£120 million of public money earmarked for a festival of Brexit could have been spent much better. It could have been spent on promoting British industry and the peaks of our culture, but it was not. It was pissed up the wall by the Tarquins of the art establishment and none of our highly paid and immensely influential politicians or civil servants prevented that from happening.

This is just another dollop of shameful waste from a shamefully wasteful and incompetent government and administrative class. It’s also yet more utterly disgraceful incompetence and failure from those who purport to govern us and who claim, often wrongly, that they are more suited to managing our affairs than we the people are.