Keir Starmer’s Cultural Legacy: The Verdict

As Sir Keir Starmer’s time in office draws to a close, the cultural legacy of his Labour government remains a study in contradiction.

Many workers in the arts sector might struggle to identify a single cultural policy, either positive or negative, introduced since Starmer took office in 2024. Yet it is easy to argue that his government has shaped Britain’s cultural landscape more profoundly than any administration this century.

For the arts sector, Starmer’s administration marked a rhetorical return of culture to the centre of government. The creative industries were formally designated one of Labour’s eight priority sectors shortly after the party entered Downing Street, placing them alongside industries such as advanced manufacturing, clean energy and life sciences. According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the creative industries contribute more than £120 billion annually to the UK economy and support over 2.4 million jobs, figures that Starmer frequently cited in arguing that the sector should play an integral role in his growth plan.

Under Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, the government sought to align cultural policy with Labour’s regional fiscal strategy, convening major cultural organisations around this objective during the autumn of 2025 in an initiative titled the Creative Places Growth Fund. Earlier in 2025, Nandy announced a review of Arts Council England with the aim of redistributing opportunity more evenly across the country. She also oversaw new support measures for film and television production in partnership with Skills England - the lineage of a notable New Labour success story.

Beneath these initiatives sat a broader conception of the state that reflected a strand of economic thinking influential within Labour during this period, particularly the work of the Italian-American economist economist Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London.

Rather than treating culture primarily as a humanitarian subject requiring endless subsidies, Starmer's government attempted to present it as productive infrastructure. In this formulation, cultural policy became less about preserving institutions and more about shaping economic outcomes. The arts were no longer discussed solely in terms of access, enrichment or public value, but as part of the machinery of national economic development.

Yet here the contradictions began to seep through. In interviews, Nandy repeatedly framed cultural participation as an issue of social mobility and access. Alongside plans for a National Youth Strategy designed to rebuild youth services after years of funding cuts, she consistently emphasised pathways into creative careers and greater access to arts education for young people with her Arts Everywhere initiative. At an international level, the establishment of a UK Soft Power Council, co-chaired by Nandy and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, reflected a renewed governmental effort to recognise culture as a major instrument of Britain’s global influence. All were welcome, yet few seemed to land as a distinct, unified message.

At the same time, many of the structural challenges inherited from the previous decade remained unresolved. Public funding pressures continued across museums, local authorities and performing arts organisations, many of whom had to find a way to operate with the same reductions implemented during the austerity era, compounded by inflationary pressures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fragile local government finances further weakened by the pandemic.

For all the government’s emphasis on widening access, questions persisted about whether investment levels were sufficient to reverse years of declining arts provision, especially in schools and rural communities. Critics argued that the extra money Starmer’s government was able to find for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was a drop in the ocean, unable to stem the flow of a public cultural sector that felt like it was steadily sinking.

Yet the same activist conception of the state that underpinned Labour’s cultural and industrial policy also emerged in a very different arena, and with much more success: the regulation of online life.

Under Starmer, the government’s most consequential interventions came not through traditional arts policy but through a new form of digital regulation. The expansion of age-verification requirements under the Online Safety Act, alongside proposals for stricter controls on children’s access to social media and online pornography, represent a hugely significant shift towards a more interventionist state online.

Starmer framed the measures as essential protections for young people and a necessary response to harms amplified by digital platforms. Many parents will support him and it may be remembered as his most welcome policy. Yet, adjacent to the art world, civil-liberties campaigners also repeatedly raised concerns about the precedent established by large-scale identity-verification systems, warning that expanded content moderation requirements and age-gating mechanisms risked creating a chilling effect on lawful speech and artistic expression, particularly around controversial and explicit cultural content. Might this precedent be maliciously misapplied by future administrations?

Starmer’s cultural legacy therefore sits between two competing narratives. On one hand, his government restored the language of public value to the arts and elevated the creative industries within Britain’s economic strategy – establishing a groundwork that may be built on by his successors. On the other, it presided over one of the most significant expansions of online regulation in modern British history, heralding a new era of state intervention in cultural life.

That tension may ultimately define the way Starmer is remembered. Labour embraced culture as a vehicle for economic freedom, growth and opportunity while simultaneously expanding the state’s role in regulating how culture is accessed, consumed and distributed online. The result was a government that viewed aspects of culture as both an engine of prosperity and an area requiring greater oversight and, ultimately, control.

If the next phase of Labour politics belongs to Andy Burnham, the direction of travel may become clearer. Burnham’s record as Mayor of Greater Manchester suggests a more overt willingness to genuinely treat culture as a form of civic infrastructure rather than a rhetorical device masking a discretionary area of spending.

Under his leadership, Greater Manchester positioned the creative industries at the centre of an economic development strategy that far outstripped every other city beyond the capital. Most notably, Burnham became one of the most visible political champions of Factory International and Aviva Studios, a fusion of private and public funding that has become perhaps the clearest expression of Labour's emerging theory of culture. If he is to be believed, a Burnham government would likely pursue many more Factory Internationals alongside a greater devolution of cultural spending for authorities outside of London. Whether that translates into meaningful improvements for artists, however, remains an open question. To do so, he will also have to achieve the one thing that consistently evaded Starmer throughout his tenure – a dynamic economy capable of delivering growth.