Remember the phrase ‘doing a Newcastle’?
It entered the local government lexicon last year when we unveiled our budget proposals and said we’d have to scrap the funding we gave to arts institutions across Newcastle.
It caused a tremendous row, even the likes of Sting and Bryan Ferry got involved, and I wrote about it in a previous comms2point0 blog that you can find here.
As I said at the time, compared to some of the choices we had to make – for example closing respite centres for children and adults with learning disabilities – you might think that arts funding would not cause us that much reputational damage.
