GIVEN the UK Government’s continuing refusal to give financial support to our struggling steel industry, I noticed with that that same Government recently slapped an export ban on a multi-million-pound piece of art, allowing taxpayer-funded arts bodies, local councils, public donations and various benefactors time to come up with the necessary funds to “save a £35 million Rembrandt for the nation” (“Temporary export ban is placed on £35m Rembrandt in hope of finding a UK buyer”, The Herald, October 17). This, mark you, is a nation so stuffed full of valuable art that more than one-third of it is not and never has been on public display.

Over the past decade the UK Government has had a 100 per cent success rate in coming up with probably hundreds of millions of pounds of directly and indirectly mostly taxpayers' hard-earned money to prevent valuable artworks and historical artefacts being sold to foreign buyers ... yet there is not one penny forthcoming to invest to temporarily subsidise steel, an industry which is vital to our nation's long term competitiveness – an industry which will undoubtedly return to profitability in the not too distant future.

Great art should not be hoarded away unseen. Art is for displaying, not for gathering dust in some dark cellar for 100 years. Selling just a fraction of it would bring in untold millions.

To add insult to injury there is the obscenity where the estates of millionaires who have died owing huge sums in taxes and death duties are permitted to pay in lieu of sometimes millions, valuable works of art "to the nation", enabling them to leave the bulk of their fortune to their families, rather than the public's half empty coffers.

But why should we be surprised by this preferential treatment given to that esoteric fraternity .... as in art's modern idiom, where the McGonagalls of their genre Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, are revered beyond the uneducated world's comprehension. The UK Government has chosen celebrity over substance ... from czars to advisers to House of Lords placements, celebrities abound, the theory being that the commoners are so captivated by their fame they will pay more attention to them than any politician.

Those naked emperors of art have amassed a fortune from their dubious skill, while most of today's genuine artists will go their lifetimes unrecognised, without due reward, just as the Burnses and the Van Goghs went their whole life under-valued and in poverty. It took future generations to realise their genius; it will take our future generations to realise how big a rip-off our modern art really was ... and in a UK devoid of heavy industry, how blind to reality the present UK Government really was.

Bill McMullen,

25B Princess Park, Erskine

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