In the interests of fair and balanced comment, it should be said that most of the speech that Margaret Hodge delivered yesterday on Britishness and the arts was an unexceptionable - though also an unexceptional - exposition of the importance of diversity and access in the subsidised arts. Until near the end it was the sort of speech about inclusivity that any New Labour culture secretary might have given - and that many of them have given often.
The part that stood out, however, was the passage in which the arts minister launched what she described as a "square on" attack on the BBC Proms. Actually the attack was expressed rather less clearly than this claim might imply. In Hodge's words: "The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking of the Proms but it is true of many others - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this." Still, we know what she meant.
Columnists, though, are judged by what we actually say, not by what we think we said or claim that we meant to say. Ministers, who have teams of people writing their speeches, should be judged by the same standard. So it is not good enough to scuttle crabwise into pretending that Hodge was only talking about the unattractive but harmless Last Night of the Proms, with its flag-waving, Edwardian japes and patriotic choruses - as some apologists were suggesting yesterday. Hodge did not attack the Last Night. She made an attack upon the Proms as a whole - and I think she should be absolutely pilloried for it.
My reasons are part general, part specific. The general reason is that, while the case for wider access is of course important, the arts debate moved on long ago. After 10 years of New Labour there is absolutely no one in the arts world who doesn't get it about access. Today the issue is not just access but excellence. That doesn't mean you can wave a magic wand and create an instant fit between outstanding creative work and the multi-class, multi-generational, multicultural public. But berating the arts for not even trying is simply unfair. Hodge should lay off.
The specific reason for indignation is Hodge's utterly bizarre snottiness about the Proms. Has she ever been? She says so but you have to wonder. Over more than two months, the Proms provide the most sustainedly accessible high-quality musical festival anywhere. They are just about the most inappropriate target in the world of subsidised classical music that any arts minister concerned about access could choose.
The range of the Proms is immense, from children's music to the avant-garde. The Proms have never been more multicultural. A couple of years ago I went to a Prom of Mongolian and Chinese music; last year I went to music from Soweto. The music of Nitin Sawhney, whom Hodge cited yesterday as a paragon of Asian-British fusion, had a Prom to itself only last August. The standard of the Proms is also very high; in one week last year I went to two of the most outstanding symphonic concerts of my life, by the Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Ticket prices are low, halls are often full, some of the concerts are relayed on screens in cities across Britain, and every single one is broadcast.
Sixty years ago this spring, another culture minister, Andrei Zhdanov, demanded that the artists of the Soviet Union should conform to the government's demand for optimistic depictions of the national spirit - or risk losing their freedom. Happily, even though Hodge's denunciation of the arts is perfect material for Private Eye's "From the Desk of the Supreme Leader" parody of Gordon Brown's government, it is not of a Zhdanovian order. But an ignorant and ambitious arts minister can do terrible damage to the fabric of any nation's cultural life - even one such as ours.
