For most of the last half-century, the British arts has run on a broadly shared principle: that artistic merit, not political acceptability, decides what gets made and what gets seen.

That principle is no longer holding. Decisions about who gets to create, perform, publish and be programmed are increasingly shaped by pressure from inside the institutions themselves — boards, colleagues, funders, internal complaints — rather than from outside critics or audiences. The mechanisms are informal. They leave no paper trail and offer no right of reply. The result is a quiet narrowing of what reaches the public, most of which the public never sees.

Freedom in the Arts is not a campaign for any particular political position. It exists because the condition of a healthy arts sector is that disagreement can exist without coercion — and that condition is now under threat.