Just how fanatically right-wing is Tony Blair’s New Labor government? So fanatically right-wing, it seems, that, not content with slashing benefits for single mothers and the handicapped, they’re now doing the same to—gasp!—the arts. Eight months after the revolution of May 1, just about every theater known to the casual observer —from the Gate in Notting Hill (one of London’s most “influential” fringe houses) to the King’s Head in Islington (the capital’s first-ever pub theater)—is trembling on the brink of closure, its funding wiped out by the heartless, philistine Tories … er, I mean Socialists. The Tories are also heartless and philistine, of course, but, after wearily enduring eighteen years of one savage indictment of Thatcherism after another from these theaters, they felt it would somehow be bad form to retaliate by closing them down, especially given the paltriness of the sums involved (the Gate has been pushed to the brink of the abyss because the London Arts Board has denied it fifteen thousand pounds). New Labor, by contrast, has a ruthless streak that Conservatives can only marvel at.

In a way, we have been here before. In 1979, during the “Winter of Discontent” union strikes, the legitimate stage, as one horny-handed son of toil to another, was officially on the side of the workers. But, irked by the shutdown’s disruption to the National Theatre, Harold Pinter, Peter Hall, and other panjandrums of the arts had a momentary descent into depravity and voted Conservative. The blood of the