Hmm …

… Bryan Appleyard —  How to Fix the Failed Arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Well, I have no right to comment on the UK's domestic politics, but this piece by Terry Teachout that I just linked to has this in it:

Molly Guptill Manning tells the story of the ASEs in the informative if lightweight When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. All who read it will be awed by the industry of the men and women who published the books, most of whom donated their services for free. (The authors and publishers of the reprints split a one-cent royalty on every paperback copy.)
Starting from scratch, these civilians quickly managed to get large numbers of books into the hands of large numbers of grateful servicemen. Without their efforts, America’s soldiers and sailors would have found their wartime service to be even more cruelly burdensome than it was—and America’s authors and publishers would have faced a very different set of problems when the war ended and those servicemen returned home.

I rather suspect the program succeeded as well as it did precisely because civilians managed it. It's one thing to have a patron of the arts like Lorenzo de Medici. It's another to have a bureaucrat or an arts administrator attempt to take the place of a Lorenzo. Lorenzo was genuinely cultured, not merely credentialed or appointed.