This has been a hallmark of political discussion since 2015: the creative industries are not proper jobs. They are not to be counted in discussions of policy. Agriculture and fishing are more appropriate to the dream of neo-Victorian Englishness which matters now. https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1278721799220592640

The economic issue is that this cultural dream trumps all other considerations - up to and including the practical necessities of its own implementation.

Incidentally: literary fiction’s love affair with the idea of an underlying atechnological humanness - with the idea that all our beepy toys and digital tools are barriers to our true nature rather than aspects of it - is party to this outcome.

Every time an author steps around technological and scientific life in a contemporary narrative purporting to be an inquiry into our selves, it strengthens the idea that these things are inauthentic, and lends itself to this dream of Tolkien’s Shire as truth.

The authenticity of “essential humanness” requires that work be immanently understandable: growing food, catching fish, digging for coal. Work that involves quibbling over lines of text is no more lionised in the canon than programming.

There are many other sources, but the cumulative result is a patchwork dream of the nation as implicitly manual, male, and white, and floating above them a benign airship aristocracy. Creative industries are invisible and suspect - and frequently complicit in vanishing the rest.

That’s how it seems to me this morning, anyway. Erm. Did not really intend to get into that over breakfast.