Description from Work Foundation's website: 'We are writing London’s Creative Economy: An Accidental Success? against the backdrop of the DCMS-led Creative Economy Green Paper Process and a decade after the ‘Creative Industries’ Taskforce first coined the term. Under the GLC in the 1980s, London was the site of pioneering work in the development of policy for what was then called the cultural industries, and it thus seems fitting to return to this city at a time when policy for these sectors is again the subject of national attention.'
'Our aim in this provocation is not to attempt a detailed audit of what the last 10 years of creative industries policy have achieved. Still less are we going to present a strategy for the future development of London’s creative industries. Our aim instead, in what is often a debate characterised by boosterism on one hand and backlash on the other, is to raise some of the issues that often get overlooked in these debates. One of the besetting sins of creative industries policy-making is its obsession with the new, its insistence that everything is ‘changed utterly,’ and its seeming ignorance, often of its own history. In part this reflects the tangling up of creative industry policy in discourse about the ‘knowledge economy,’ with its persistent myth-making about novelty. In part it results from its association, with ‘New’ Labour, the setting up of the Creative Industry Taskforce and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, being early New Labour creations. But the striking thing about any reflection on creative industries policy making is how many of the issues are not new; simply unresolved.'
http://www.theworkfoundation.com/products/publications/azpublications/londonscreativeeconomy.aspx