Arts funding has truly gone off the rails

Arts Council England’s ingrained hostility to opera, as David Mellor reported last week, means that over the next three years it is bizarrely awarding National Portfolio Organisation status and grants totalling £750,000 to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and giving English

National Opera nothing. The steam railway merits funding from appropriate sourcing, but I can’t discern any straightforward link whatsoever to the arts in its activities.

T. Couzens, London