Cast your mind back 10 years to May 1997. There we were, at the start of a bright, vigorous administration called New Labour which came to power on a wave of public optimism about the future of the country and the opportunities for a fresh government of radical change. What were Britain's museums and galleries like?  Most of the effort of the previous Tory government had been placed on trying to get museums to be, as far as possible, financially more self-sufficient; less dependent on government funding and much more on the marketplace; more visitor-oriented and less dominated by narrow scholarly and professional concerns. Museums were to be less dependent on public funding and more on private, including, most especially, charges to visitors.  What, then, were the prospects for a new Labour government? At the National Portrait Gallery, where I was then the director, we invited Tony Banks, the former chairman of the GLC, to dinner, knowing that he was enthusiastic about portraits and, indeed, was a knowledgeable collector. The following day he tabled an early day motion in the House of Commons deploring the fact that the trustees had not thought it appropriate to acquire a luminous purple bust of Eric Cantona. This was an early indication of which way the government would swing - populist and demotic and passionately interested in sport, less committed to institutions of high culture, and not interested in connecting to history.  Chris Smith was appointed Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In terms of museums, Chris was faced by a number of big issues: what to do about entrance charges? What to do about central government funding? What to do about the regional museums? And what to do about the Dome?  To our great surprise, he succeeded in persuading the Treasury that a policy of free admission should be introduced to all the national museums, helped, I suspect, by Geoffrey Robinson, who was at that time Paymaster General, and, I presume, by the Chancellor himself, who is known to have lobbied for free entry to his local museum when he was a student. This was, so far as I am concerned, an immediate and immense public benefit and a very positive achievement of the current administration. I think that it is incontestable that the policy of free admission has greatly increased the number of visits to the great national collections overall, most especially to those institutions, like the V&A, which used to charge, and there is considerable evidence that it has increased the overall number of visitors.  However, while I applaud the social and educational benefits of free admission, it has been an expensive policy to implement, as all the spare cash that has been directed towards national museums has been used in essentially bribing the former charging museums to go free.  The second issue that Chris faced was what to do about funding. Under the Labour government, there has been some level of very modest increase or, at the very least, stabilisation in funding to the national museums, roughly in line with inflation. As a result, the long period of stable funding has allowed for consistent forward planning, so there have not been nearly so many noises over the past decade of museums and galleries being in a state of financial crisis  The third area, in which I think this government has been genuinely successful, is in doing something about the plight of the regional museums and galleries. In November 2000, Nicholas Serota gave the Dimbleby Lecture on television in which he deplored the decline of the major regional galleries. 'Across the country we have great museums which are withering, not for want of imagination, but for want of resources which can unlock new opportunities,' he said. Not long afterwards a report was commissioned under the title 'Renaissance in the Regions'.  In 2003 funding was given for a programme which resulted in much-needed and now increasingly obviously successful development. One of the great achievements of the past decade has been to tilt the balance of cultural activity away from the capital towards the regions. This has been achieved partly through the policies of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has invested in local and regional culture and which has helped, for example, to make it possible for the National Gallery to show regular exhibitions in Bristol's City Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle.  I don't think that it is for me to dwell much on the Dome, a conflagration of public money on a truly epic scale. What I think is clear is that, to some extent, it robbed the Labour government of its cultural language and its sense of confidence and purpose in the cultural arena. Until the disaster of the Dome, there had been much talk of 'cool Britannia', of 'creative Britain', of the importance of the new cultural industries and the celebration of design, creativity and fashion. But the Dome turned all that optimism slightly bitter and we have heard remarkably little in recent years of the government's - let alone the Prime Minister's - attitude towards the arts and culture, as if it has become shy of celebrating its achievements, preferring instead to take consolation in its more easily celebrated achievement of winning the Olympics.  One hears precious little in public discourse about the revival of regional culture - the emblematic importance of the Baltic and of Sage, the new concert hall on the banks of the Tyne in Gateshead; or of the Lowry and the Imperial War Museum of the North in regenerating Salford.  Why, when London is the global capital of exhibitions, bringing foreign currency to London (we calculated, for example, that our Raphael exhibition brought £30 million of inward investment to London), has the government chosen to keep culture so much at arm's length and not to embrace it, as has, for example, the Spanish government in its recent support for the National Gallery's Velazquez exhibition? Is this based on a presumption that any association with culture will be electorally unhelpful with the tabloids ?  If so, it is worth asking the question whether we really live in a society where an interest in culture, museums and the arts is still viewed, as in the 1950s, as a purely middle-class preserve, rather than a mass democratic and social activity. Certainly I am sceptical that the arts are still such a minority interest now that you have so much crossover between high culture and popular culture; when at least 35 per cent of the population goes through higher education; and when there are more than 42 million visits to museums every year, more than to football matches.  Then there are Labour's deficits. The first, and most serious, is that the government has failed almost completely to encourage a more effective public philanthropy. Not enough effort has been put into trying to ensure that private wealth is converted into civic virtue. It would have been a way of squaring the circle between public hostility towards big City bonuses and ensuring that this new-found wealth can be turned to public advantage. It may be that the Labour government believes at heart that only the state can do good in society.  The second deficit I would see as a loss of a sense of the virtues and values of the past. New Labour has tended to be a slightly glossy political philosophy, concentrated on its recognition of the values of consumerism, on pop rather than the past. It has failed to engage in any deeper way with people's sense of themselves and of their culture and society.  The third deficit is the failure of the government to engage with what is clearly an increasingly serious situation as regards the ability of museums and galleries to add to their collections. There is no sense of seeking and securing a future legacy; no idea that museums act as the guardians and custodians of the present; no recognition that people in the future will want to know about the cultural achievements of the present; no belief in the virtue of building the collections of museums. The National Gallery complains about the absence of effective funding for acquisitions, with an increasing inability to add to the collection either from the sale of works of art by landowners in this country, let alone on the international art market. But so, too, does the Tate. Where is the best place to see the work of the Young British Artists? Probably in private collections in Miami, Florida.  Is the V&A busy acquiring the relics of the material culture of the present? I doubt it, with only about £250,000 per annum to spend on acquisitions covering nearly the whole field of human creativity - prints, drawings, photographs, fashion, furniture, textiles.  What is clear is that in the 1950s, in the wake of an impoverished, socialist Britain, museums and galleries were busy collecting, displaying and treasuring contemporary art for the benefit of future audiences. What, by contrast, is the record of the past 10 years? New art is all too often in private, not public collections, so that it cannot be seen and enjoyed and appreciated by a broad and democratic public.  So, what of the next 10 years? The case I have been trying to make for investment in museums and culture is not party political, but political in a broader sense as to what cultural landscape we all wish to inhabit in the future for ourselves and for our children. Is it one in which we are going to recognise the virtues and values of cultural activity both for their own sake, as humanising and socialising forces, and as part of the dynamic of post-industrial society?  At the moment, we are told by the Department for Culture that the Chancellor is threatening to cut the grants of museums and galleries by 7 per cent per annum for three successive years. Gordon Brown will thereby effectively wipe out all the benefits of the past 10 years. Museums are not institutions which can easily weather big cuts because they have high capital costs simply to keep open. If the government reduces its baseline support by the amount it is saying it will, then the public programmes of museums and galleries, their exhibitions and education programmes, will be damaged disproportionately. I cannot believe that the Chancellor wants this to happen.  At the same time, I think it is essential that the Treasury gives more creative thought to how to translate the immense amount of private wealth to public benefit. We need to encourage private individuals to get more actively involved in museum projects, to give and bequeath works of art, both historic and modern, and to support exhibitions.  This is an edited version of the first lecture in the MRT Lecture Series 2007, The State of the Arts, to be held at 7pm on Tuesday at the Royal Geographical Society, London SW7. Tickets cost £15 and are available on the door or by calling 020 8742 3355. Visit www.martinrandall.com for more information.
In this wide-ranging and passionate essay, the National Gallery's director, Charles Saumarez Smith, warns that Labour has lost its nerve over the country's treasures.