Cultural Shock Doctrine Round-up

A round-up of news on cultural funding post-Spending Review 

1. How do you define 'front line' services in the arts? 

Charlotte Higgins' made a great speech at the Paul Hamlyn foundation awards for artists and composers. Here is an abridged version: 

The great artistic achievements of this country don't start in our rightly celebrated national institutions – the Royal Opera House or the National Theatre or Tate Modern. They start in bedrooms in Bradford and garrets in Glasgow and classrooms in Coventry. They start in grubby student accommodation and after-school clubs and through the energy of surprising and inspiring teachers. People become artists because of a complicated web of interconnecting threads. What happens in your school is hugely important. What happens in your university or conservatoire or art school is hugely important – and we are hearing terrible intimations of what might happen to funding for the arts in higher education. What happens in your town – the local museum, the library, the theatre – is hugely important. Our Government is happy to celebrate our great national institutions but it needs to protect the delicate network that supports them. It needs to provide the solid framework around which enlightened philanthropy can work.

Talking of the spending review... Well, George Osborne's announcing a cut of 15% to the arts really was quite breathtaking, wasn't it – when the actual cut to Arts Council England's budget was 30%. Jeremy Hunt promised us fresh ideas as culture secretary, but I don't think anyone anticipated an idea as creative as this: a completely new way of describing the national arts budget that no one had ever thought up before.

So: Arts Council England is going to be cut by an overall 30%, but Jeremy Hunt has asked them to pass on cuts of only 15% to the "front line".

Asked to define "front line", Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, said that the organisations that the Arts Council regularly funds are "front line" and everything else is not.

According to that definition, the funding that supports national touring for opera and art shows is not "front line". A scheme that offers parents interest-free loans to buy musical instruments for their children is not "front line". Manchester international festival, which has commissioned artists such as Jeremy Deller, Steve McQueen and Joe Duddell is not front line.

As Higgins has argued in another article, "These cuts within higher education cannot be seen in isolation from those to culture in general: to museums, to the theatres, orchestras and other arts organisations up and down the land and to local authority cultural budgets."

2. Boris and Cumberbatch get in on the action

An article in the Evening Standard details Boris Johnson and Benedict Cumberbatch's warnings that private sponsorship will not make up for the massive cuts in cultural budgets. Indeed, they actually fell by 8% last year, apparently.

(Johnson worried enough about re-election to have momentary memory laspes that he is a Tory?)

3. Where will the next generation of artists come from? Not from Somerset.

Tory Shire cuts 100% of its arts subsidy. Somerset council voted to end £160,000 of direct grants to 10 organisations, including theatres and a film production company, as part of a £43m programme of cuts across the services.

Charlie Dearden, director of Bridgwater Arts Centre, said 25,000 people were participating in arts and media projects in the county of Somerset, half of them located in deprived areas.

4. And the winner is...

According to the Mail (and reported in BFI Watch) the Government has announced that what remains of the UK FIlm Council's responsibilities to fund film in the UK will be transferred to the British Film Institute.

I'm not sure what to make of this last one yet. It effectively puts institutionalised film policy back where it was before all this Film Council nonsense. But it seems unlikely that this will result in a return to the days of the Production Board. The wider situation has changed - not least because of National Lottery funding. The BFI has changed too. So how will it cope?

Film Policy in the UK and the Spending Review: The Cultural-Shock Doctrine in Action?

The Spending Review and Film

In one of the first posts on this blog I speculated as to whether the closure of the UK Film Council would signal a return to the dark days of the 1980s and the almost complete collapse of British film production. As I said then, the devil is in the detail: how much will overall subsidy be reduced, how will it be distributed? The details of the cuts made to public subsidy for film in the UK are now emerging. What do these suggest?

Cuts or Restructuring?

The following article in Screen Daily outlines the cuts, reproduced via BFI Watch:

film-sector funding outside Lottery funds and the British Film Institute (BFI) has been slashed by over 50% . . .

. . . the annual grant-in-aid budget for film in each of the next four years will be around £18.618m, down from £23.9m in the year 2010/11. After counting the BFI’s newly reduced annual budget, that leaves just £4.655m for all other film activities (excluding Lottery development/production funding which the government has pledged to maintain at current levels). That £4.655m will have to cover:

• inward investment and the work of the British Film Commissioner
• National and regional screen agencies
• research and statistics
• film exports
• certification (assessing which films qualify as British and are therefore eligible for Lottery funding and/or UK Film Tax Relief)
• diversity initiatives
• anti-piracy initiatives
• co-production support
• The UK MEDIA Desk activities
• Sponsorship of work such as The UK Film Centre at Cannes

Cuts had been anticipated but the 50% figure for non-BFI and non-Lottery funding is a stiff reduction and confirms the fear of many in the industry that, while Lottery funding and the tax certification are safe, other areas of the film business will suffer . . .

. . . Meanwhile regional screen agencies are anticipating a cut in funding along the same 15% lines as the BFI.

So these are big cuts, disproportionately placed on certain parts of the subsidised film sector. The tax incentives designed to stimulate commercial feature film production and inward investment are maintained, along with Lottery funding for production. The main cuts are to come from the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies. The Spending Review can be seen, therefore, as a restructuring exercise for film subsidy in the UK. We can understand it by looking at the structure of film subsidy during the New Labour period.

The Structure of Film Subsidy under New Labour

In the UK Film Council’s first major policy statement, ‘Towards a Sustainable Film Industry’, then Chairman Alan Parker described the UKFC’s strategy thus: "Essentially our intention is to use public money to make better, more popular and more profitable films in real partnership with the private sector, which drives our industry and largely creates our film culture." On the other hand, the “cultural role of the UK FILM COUNCIL has been largely delegated to the British Film Institute and its regional partners." (Here, page 1)

While the separation of industrial and cultural functions proved to be not as neat as Parker would have us think, this demonstrates the structural division between commercial subsidy – primarily via the tax incentive and lottery investment in production – and cultural subsidy – via the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies – that characterised the New Labour period. As a DEMOS report put it: “The Government and the UK Film Council look to the RSAs to help capture the many facets of British communities”:

To encourage the growth of a sense of community and identity, to identify and empower under-represented and marginalised voices, give support for different forms of distribution, and ensure diversity of access and participation. (Here, pages 20 and 17)

In policy terms, the social and cultural objectives of film subsidy – community, identity, diversity, social inclusion – were placed onto the RSAs and the BFI. The extent to which the Regional Screen Agencies concerned themselves with social and cultural initiatives in practice is a bigger topic than I have space to discuss here, but it is undoubtedly true that they provided a badly-needed inroad to the industry for marginalised social groups. However imperfect they were, these aspects of film policy recognised the failure of the market to be representative of British social and cultural life. It is these sorts of initiatives that will be reduced. We’ve already seen Screen East, one of the Regional Screen Agencies, close (although the circumstances of this are unclear).

So while operators like Clint Eastwood, Dreamworks and Directors UK might be breathing a sigh of relief for the moment, this spells trouble for community film-makers in Leicester or Newcastle. In short, these cuts are not fair; like the more general attack on the welfare state of which they are a part they will disproportionally effect the poorer, more independent and vulnerable sections of the film sector. 

In the 1980s commercial subsidies – the Eady Levy in particular – were slashed leading to the almost complete collapse of commercial feature film production in this country. At the same time, cultural-film subsidy was maintained at a certain level, mostly through BFI Production. This produced some memorable, often oppositional films (My Beautiful Laundrette, Orlando, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Young Soul Rebels).

In this phase of neoliberal restructuring we appear to be witnessing the opposite strategy: the maintenance of subsidy to the commercial film sector at the same time as the withdrawal of state support for the cultural sector. This is the cultural-shock doctrine in action.

RIP UKFC: Geoffrey Macnab's Obituary of the UK FIlm Council

Geoffrey Macnab gives his obituary to the UK Film Council in October’s Sight and Sound.

This piece is worth a read for the insight it sheds on the debates that took place when the UK Film Council was formed, particularly the elusive desire for a sustainable, large-scale UK film industry.

As Macnab says, “the furore over the announcement [of the closure of the UK Film Council] underlines just how dependent on public funding the British film industry remains. It also reminds us how bitter the debates about public film policy have always been.”

He continues:

“We’re now at the end of a cycle. The UKFC is faced with abolition and the public film-funding model will almost certainly have to be redesigned. It was telling that in April 2010 the UKFC announced that its current chairman Tim Bevan would chair a think tank to identify ways of ‘growing UK companies of scale’. This, of course, was exactly the goal back in 1997, when the government awarded the three lottery-backed franchises worth more than £90 million over six years. The truth is that in 2010, over half of independent production companies are loss-making.”

The goal of a self-sustaining film industry is no more realistic now than it was back in 1998, or 1968 for that matter. The question is now, as it was then, how to sustain film-making in this country.

Any ideas let me – or Jeremy Hunt – know.


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Cultural Shock Doctrine Part Two - Hunt Attacks Progessive Cultural Policy

Jeremy-culture-vandal-Hunt (who is fast becoming a favourite subject of this Blog) used his speech at the Media Festival Arts in London to reiterate his “long term commitment to the arts sector”. Hunt talked of sharing pain, future growth, blah blah blah...

But what shape is this sector going to take? Hunt also took the opportunity to take a swipe at instrumental aspects of cultural funding under New Labour, according to The Mail:

“Public money will no longer be given to arts organisations simply because they hire a high proportion of women or ethnic minorities”. The “days of securing taxpayer funds purely by box ticking – getting cash simply because a diversity target has been hit – are now over.”

This suggests a number of things about the politics of the cultural shock doctrine.

Firstly, the idea that organisations were hiring a high proportion of women or ethnic minorities to get cash is laughable – the problem has always been that were not hiring a fair proportion, ie one that reflects the population as a whole, the local area or the audience. Instrumental policies, where they actually existed, were designed to address systemic racism and sexism by increasing diversity to more equal levels. Attacks on policies that attempt to make the cultural sector a more equal place are, of course, quite natural Tory territory.

Secondly, there has been a popular and sector perception of this sort of reverse discrimination going back to the cultural industries days of the Greater London Council in the 1980s. However, the extent to which this ever informed creative industries policies in their post-1997 incarnation is debatable (The Mail can only give the example of one book of ethnic minority poetry, although, to be fair, this may represent poor journalism). New Labour were able, through the discourse of the creative industries, to draw together the genuinely politically progressive sections of the cultural sector that developed in the 1980s behind the idea of market-led diversity. To take an example from film policy:

“Diversity is both a catalyst for creativity and is key to the success of the UK film sector. However, the profile of the sector’s workforce shows it has a long way to go before it can demonstrate that it is inclusive of the diversity of contemporary British society. Inevitably, this has a significant impact on the stories that are told, the way they are told on screen, the levels of access to film for potential audiences and, in terms of content and portrayal, the images of Britain and the concepts of “Britishness” around the globe.” (Report here, page 5)

This is a reflection of a cultural policy that managed to align a progressive cultural politics with commercial interests. While this discourse paid lip-service to diversity, multi-culturalism and so on, its real focus was always the market. It therefore found it hard to interfere with areas of the market that worked but also happened to be white-male dominated. As a result, New Labour cultural policy was seemingly unable to make a case for diversity that is not based on commercial success; a moral or political argument, for instance. As mentioned in a previous post, after thirteen years of this, research has shown that the film industry is still inherently racist and sexist. Furthermore, in employment terms the cultural sector is more male dominated than the rest of the economy (63% compared to 53% - figure here, page 47). The idea that the last thirteen years were a bonanza in public funding for members of ethnic minorities and women regardless of talent or quality is a myth promoted by arseholes such as this one.

For the Tories, attacks on this sort of thinking are a coded way of attacking the principle of anything remotely politically progressive in cultural policy in general and clearly they are signalling that they are withdrawing support and political influence from the liberal cultural intelligentsia. Further, this works to deflect criticism from the cultural shock doctrine – the cuts in cultural funding are about withdrawing the tax burden created by rampant political correctness and restoring cultural authority to the white middle-classes, as opposed to hamstringing the cultural sector. As Kristine Landon-Smith argues in the Newstateman, “we are seeing a retrogressive new conservatism at work.”

At the same time, this ties into a genuine hostility to the cultural management mechanisms favoured by New Labour – the hysterical emphasis on targets, application forms, report-writing; a bureaucratic centralised system which effectively stifled autonomy.

New Labour came to power in 1997 with a relatively coherent cultural policy developed during time in opposition with clear differences to their predecessors. Cultural conservatism was to be dispelled in favour of modernisation; the heritage industries became creative industries. So far the ConDems have only demonstrated slash and burn dressed up as right wing dogma. We can undoubtedly expect more of this sort of thing in the coming months and years.

Should we Defend the UK Film Council Reprise

Like I said in the previous post, the New Left Project website is excellent.  And to prove it they have published my defence of the UK Film Council, a slightly revised version of an earlier post here.  Very nice of them.

Jeremy Hunt Defends Closure of UK Film Council

Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary responsbile for axing the UK Film Council, has responded to his critics in an article in the Observer.  A good opportunity to demonstrate that this was not an ideologically-driven slash-and-burn policy rushed out before any serious consideration of a replacment system could take place, you might think.  So did Hunt:

A) Reassure the British film industry that solid plans are in place to replace the UKFC?

B) Offer meaningless platitudes such as "we must step up our ambitions and make the UK the best country for nurturing and promoting its homegrown creative talent"?

UK FILM COUNCIL CLOSURE: The Best Reaction so Far

From the Daily Mash:

THE closure of the UK Film Council is a largely Danny Dyer-based decision, the culture secretary confirmed last night.

A sequel to Lesbian Vampire Killers is now looking increasingly unlikelyJeremy Hunt said the closure will mean the loss of 75 jobs but also guarantees a 92% reduction in poisonously bad Mockney crime capers over the next three years.

The Football Factory 'actor' who deliberately misspells his surname, will be slowly wound down over the next 18 months and eventually shoved off the end of Clacton pier.

Mr Hunt said: "It wasn't just Dyer, of course. Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, St Trinians, St Trinians II, that awful piece of shit about the spaceship on the way to the sun - please stop me when you've spotted the new Lawrence of Arabia."

Director Roy Hobbs has been forced him to postpone his latest film, You Fackin' Slag, a gritty, uncompromising drama about people who live in a horrible place but retain a wonderful sense of humour and rob a bank.

He added: "This is a disastrous decision that will force the British film industry into making films people actually want to see. Meanwhile I've got at least four Winstones sitting around doing nothing on time and a half."

Julian Cook, editor of Cinema magazine, said: "Thanks to public subsidy Britain is making some fantastic films such as the The Football Factory, the St Trinian's series and that wonderful film about the spaceship on the way to the sun.

"Meanwhile the best the Americans can come up with is rubbish like Sideways, Juno, Good Night and Good Luck, No Country for Old Men and The Godfather.

"Just imagine how good The Godfather could have been, if only it had been part-funded by the government."

Ken Loach, the artistic force behind some of the most wilfully unpopular British films of the last 40 years, insisted he would bring some of his trademark realism to his next project, a chalk and cheese buddy cop movie featuring a talkative pussy.

Loach said: "Admittedly Meow You're Talkin! is a change of pace for me, but it will be infused with authenticity, if we can just get the cat to improvise."

SHOULD WE DEFEND THE UK FILM COUNCIL?

There have been many responses to the ConDems plans to abolish the UK Film Council so far, including a Facebook protest group, a campaign website and a petition that, at the time of writing, has nearly 16,000 signatures (including my own).  This commentary presents a range of arguments which can be divided into two categories.

Firstly, the industry view.  This has been a combination of shock and incredulity.  For example, the Film Council's chairman, Tim Bevan: "Abolishing the most successful film support organisation the UK has ever had is a bad decision, imposed without any consultation or evaluation".  He continues, "People will rightly look back on today's announcement and say it was a big mistake, driven by short-term thinking and political expediency. British film, which is one of the UK's more successful growth industries, deserves better." 

Likewise John Woodward, the UKFC's Chief Executive: "Having first seen the bus marked 'Quango Cuts' hurtling towards us two years ago, I was certain we had proved our value.  But then, last Friday, the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt carefully backed the bus up, put his foot on the gas and drove it straight into us."

What is at stake for the industry is captured in a letter to the Guardian from Directors UK (a guild for film and television directors).  It argues that the UKFC "helped to create a unified cultural and industrial film sector, and [spoke] much good sense to both government and to the industry.  We welcome the proposed retention of film tax relief and the production fund, but we also want to see an effective environment within which they will operate, with no return to the chaos of the 1990s, with its conflicting bodies and departments and no single voice for the industry."

As mentioned in a previous post, the extent to which the UKFC seems to represent the entirety of British film culture in this discourse is interesting.  This assumes that the British film industry is a single monolithic entity that has a unified set of interests.  However, the UKFC, with its Board made up of industry movers and shakers, always represented the interests of the employers, the big money, more than it did struggling independent film-makers or those concerned with the less profitable aspects of cinematic activity. 

The "chaos of the 1990s" was the previous patchy and underfunded set of organisations - particularly the British Film Institute and the Regional Arts Boards with their broadly cultural remits - that had developed over a long period out of motivations to build aspects of film culture that were not catered for by the industry, such as minority cultural films, film education, political film-making, or community film-making.  The UKFC subsumed these within its "unified cultural and industrial film sector" which was basically a subsidised industrial sector geared to the perceived needs of business, much in keeping with New Labour's neoliberal restructuring of other parts of the public sector.  And it did this very well with relatively large amounts of subsidy.

Which leads us to the second category, the view of the independent sector.  These display a mixture of surprise, schadenfreude and tentative hope.  For example, Undercurrents, an activist film group, posted on their blog: "When I find something that I agree with in a Tory Government, should I begin to worry?" 

Filmutopia points out the irony of the situation: "For years, UKFC and their regional representatives have quite literally made decisions about who and what to fund, based on arbitrary and shifting criteria, which ultimately impacted on the personal finances and careers of the people involved. The fact that they are now being treated with the same 'well, we don't think your efforts are worth funding' mentality, that they themselves handed out on a daily basis, that tickles me."

Or take Brett Gerry, an independent film-maker based in the North East: "The UK Film Council failed totally at its remit, relaxing into a position whereby it fed a glossy Hollywood machine with docile crew and picture-postcard locations, and made pathetic token gestures at ‘real’ films for this country . . . Not a single one attempted to build a national film identity unique to this country, but all modelled themselves on a gross North American product".  Gerry argues that, "With the UK Film Council on the way out, there is now greater opportunity for those locked out of the old system to forge new directions in British cinema."

Alex Cox has been one of the most consistently vitriolic critics of the UKFC.  He argued that "It's very good news for anyone involved in independent film.  The Film Council became a means by which lottery money was transferred to the Hollywood studios.  It pursued this phoney idea that James Bond and Harry Potter were British films. But, of course, those films were all American – and their profits were repatriated to the studios in Los Angeles."

Equally consistent has been Colin MacArthur: "All sympathy to those about to lose their jobs, but the UK Film Council has been hoist by its own petard . . . it shovelled heaps of sterling into the already bulging pockets of the American majors . . . The [UKFC] did not foresee that an incoming Conservative-led government might just take the council's boasting about how business-friendly it was at face value.  If the market is so responsive to British film, went the Tory thinking, then the market can handle it without the Film Council.  It is profoundly ironic that it is the BFI . . . which will survive while the council goes under."

There is the sense that the chickens have come home to roost for the UKFC. Devoting themselves so slavishly to the market they are now the victims of its logic: the financial sector is more important to the ConDems than the film sector.

But was the UKFC so entirely market-orientated?

In fact, the UKFC presents an interesting case study into the operations of cultural policy under New Labour; the extent to which cultural subsidy had become instrumental in the neoliberal colonisation of the public sector and the transfer of public money to private interests.  To take two examples: one of the most lauded capital funding projects the UKFC initiated was the Digital Screen Network which completed in 2008 after converting 239 cinema screens from film projection to digital projection, giving the UK the largest number in Europe (until it was overtaken by France in 2009).  The potential benefits of this to cinema goers and smaller British film-makers alike were enormous: digital distribution is about 90% cheaper than traditional film and lowering the costs of distribution could open up the market to smaller, independent production companies and increase the proportion of non-Hollywood cinema shown on British screens.  However, in practice the savings accrue to distributors, of which ten companies control around 90% of the market.  Eight of these are American-owned, one French and one British.  The Digital Screen Network failed to tackle their industry position and effectively subsidised their already considerable share of the profits.  So while recent statistics show that the proportion of British films shown on British screens increased slightly in 2009, the main beneficiaries have been large international companies.

Example number two: much has been made of the UKFC’s role in training and development, particularly money spent on creating inroads to the industry for previously marginalised social groups.  They pumped money into regionally-based digital short film production schemes, helped set up several Screen Academies and funded low-budget feature films by often first-time creative teams.  This has allowed many people to make films who would not otherwise have been able to do so.  At the same time, it effectively outsources training, research and development – the sort of thing the industry used to do for itself – to the public sector whilst also providing publicly-funded products for commercial exploitation and a large pool of non-unionised skilled labour.  While this needs to be seen in the context of overall growth in the film sector in the period, again the overwhelming benefits accrue to the existing broadcast and film sectors.  For every Shane Meadows that has come through this system there are many more people working on low pay in short-term contracts with very little creative control over what they make.  Furthermore, research has shown that after ten years of such initiatives the film industry is still systemically racist and sexist.

In both these cases what was required was funding initiatives that shifted market power away from dominant commercial interests in favour of smaller organisations through the creation of an alternative distribution sector and film production network (what Margaret Dickinson and Sylvia Harvey have called the ‘other cinema’ strategy).  This could have provided a space for the production of films not made in the market place and created ongoing programs of work that kept film-makers in bread and butter when the international money dried up, as it periodically does.  In turn, this would have provided an outlet for such work.  It would, however, have involved interfering with the interests of the established commercial organisations, which New Labour simply would not countenance, seeing them as the drivers of all things of value.

So is the UKFC worth defending?  The answer is yes, and there are two reasons why.  Firstly, the context of overall cuts in subsidy means that whatever system replaces the UKFC it is more than likely going to have less money, and will probably be worse.  Secondly, the overall cutting back of commercial film production will have a large negative effect on the people that work in the film industry, whether through increased unemployment or decreased bargaining power, lower wages and poorer conditions.  The ability to make a broad range of different films in this country, and to see as broad a range as possible from elsewhere, depends on the levels of public subsidy available and this is the issue at stake.  Defending the UKFC is thus a position which, in the current climate, helps to defend the principle of not leaving culture to the market in general and defending film culture in particular.

Ultimately, then, defending film relies on reasons other than the relative amounts of profit different subsidy systems generate for private business.  Those concerned with film culture in whatever sense need to join the dots between their campaign and the wider campaign to defend public services.  And if the ConDems want to take British film back to the lean times of the 1980s then film-makers should take the lead and develop the sort of oppositional film sector that that decade of British cinema is best remembered for.

The End of the UK Film Council: A return to the 1980s?

Yesterday the ConDems announced their plans to abolish the UKFC as part of their more general policy of slash and burn in public services (Netribution has live commentary here).  We imagine for many people it comes as a surprise to think of the UKFC as a public service, not least the executives judging by the salaries they paid themselves.  They did everything they were supposed to: it wasn't subsidy, culture or art, but investment, economic development and sustainability.  Judging by the reactions so far, the extent to which the UKFC came to represent the British film industry becomes apparent, as if nothing is imaginable without them. 

This, then, is an opportunity to think through some 'old' arguments.  Why, and in what way, should the government fund film?  The UKFC and its advocates seem to be almost completely incapable of making an argument that does not come down to a commercial logic: we invest money into the film industry which has been a growth area of the UK economy.  They always represented the perceived interests of the industry players more than the public, or most individual film-makers, who were required to work within a framework that emphasised commercial potential at the expense of everything else.  Well, commercial logic has come back to bite them: propping up the banking sector is clearly more valuable to the economy than propping up the film industry.  But defending public subsidy at a time like this requires arguments based on other reasons, cultural reasons, political reasons, moral reasons, for example.  It is these arguments, more than any others, that can sustain opposition to the ConDems plans for the Big Society (which looks increasingly like 'there is no such thing as society') and judging by the comments on the 'Save the UKFC' Facebook group it is these arguments that motivate most people to defend the UKFC as well.

So is this the death of the UK film industry?  A return to the bad old days of Thatcher and the almost complete collapse of British film production?  The government's announcement is that it will establish a more direct relationship with the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies are apprently safe, for the moment.  This would seem to be a return to the state of things pre-UKFC with a modest film-culture infrastructure.  But is the BFI now capable of fulfilling this role, particularly in terms of production?


The devil, as always, is in the detail.  The key questions are: how much will overall subsidy be reduced?  How will it be distributed?
 
Watch this space.