Cavalier Attitude: Tax Breaks, Tantrums and TIFFs
For some mysterious reason – most likely down to a conspiracy by secret cabals of alien lizards* – I was recently invited to the launch of the new UK tax breaks for animation, games and high-end TV.
Although the mood was understandably upbeat due to this rather amazing helping hand from the coalition government, having attended a seminar about the same subject two weeks before I got the feeling the positive vibe was noticeably tempered this time by two factors:
Firstly, word had got round that the Irish tax break, seemingly in reaction to the UK’s, had been raised enough by those cheeky Celtic chappies to make it significantly higher than our own incentive, which was of course introduced to “level the playing field”.
Secondly, the UK’s video games tax incentive – designed on exactly the same lines as those of animation and high-end TV – had been held up, pending investigation by the EEC.
Now if this was, as I suspect, another secret lizard conspiracy – this time to boost support for UKIP – then it certainly paid dividends in the local elections that followed. In fact a recent survey discovered that the entire turnout for these local elections, around 8.5 voters in each constituency, all comprised of game makers shuffling out of their pizza-strewn bunkers, blinking in the daylight to register an anti-EEC protest vote (and I’m allowed to say stuff like that about game creators because I sometimes am one).
The main reasons for this EEC hold up seemed to be for Brussels to investigate whether there was “no obvious market failure” in video games and if this incentive might lead to “a subsidy race”. The fact that this whole business of the introduction of UK tax incentives was sparked by the clear erosion of the world-beating UK games industry by such subsidies abroad would seem to indicate that there was some “market failure”. As for a “subsidy race”, I take it they mean actions like the recent Irish tax break increase, a move presumably ratified by the EEC itself.
In any case, thanks to the UK tax incentives (the animation version of which was the result of an impressive campaign led by animation’s Robin Hood, Oli Hyatt of Blue Zoo) the arguments for outsourcing are now considerably weakened. For a start, isn’t outsourcing to low-income economies morally questionable?
Animation production may not be as dangerous as heavy industry, but the recent fire at a factory in India – in which health and safety conditions were nonexistent – where they made clothes for the UK high street shows that by outsourcing you are very likely bypassing most of the rules developed to protect workers and give them proper conditions and rights. Or is that considered okay because they live outside of the UK?
Chancellor George Osborne speaking at BAFTA’s offices in London
And isn’t outsourcing ultimately unsustainable? If jobs and wealth are sucked out of the main target nations like the UK, USA and Western Europe, then who exactly is meant to buy the product you are creating when you’ve just rendered the target audience unemployed and poor?
On another moral note, we surely have an obligation where possible to support our kids, the ones that have been taught skills in the institutions that our taxes pay for, the fantastic art colleges that are the reason the UK has a creative sector in the first place.
Yes we have a tradition of lone suburban creators, artists, inventors and musicians in their garden sheds, bedrooms and garages, and the traditional UK animation industry has often been described as a cottage industry (or a cowshed in Oliver Postgate’s case), but the art colleges have always been the place these disparate characters can group together, find kindred spirits and learn how to present themselves and their ideas to the outside world in a useful way; To form bands called Multi Story Car Park, make films, get a portfolio and showreel together and smoke lots of roll-ups.
This is why we are recognized as one of the pop-culture centres of the world and have a creative sector that pulls in something like 36 billion a year, which is not far off what the bankers bring in. And although it might have caused boom and bust in the checked-shirt markets, unlike the bankers the creative sector didn’t break the economy and cause a world recession.
Ultimately if there are no jobs waiting for kids who come out of art schools to enable them pay off their £9000-a-year fees, then they will stop enrolling and the creative traditions start to die.
Don’t forget, these art school traditions of creativity are the reason that the UK has incomparable bands, TV, films, games and animation. This is how we have produced internationally recognized ‘brands’ like Peppa Pig, Wallace and Gromit, Bob the Builder and Lara Croft, not to mention James Bond, Harry Potter and bands like The Beatles, The Clash, The Stone Roses, Radiohead and…er…Coldplay (although the college that produced them should perhaps have a rethink). Despite being so heavily subsidized, I don’t think Canada can produce a list like that. So can we now perhaps try and reward our own economy for this success?
*Maybe I’m an alien lizard without even knowing it?
This column is written anonymously by animation director Stephen Cavalier, whose twenty-year career can be measured as a slow professional and moral decline from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Modern Toss.
Stephen is also the author of The World History of Animation, available in all good bookshops (as they say).
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