New Deal of the Mind

New Deal of the Mind was established in 2009. During 2013 it closed down its website and became a dormant, non-trading, company.

NDotM developed from an article written in the New Statesman in January 2009 by Martin Bright, the magazine’s former political editor. In this piece, Bright suggested that cultural elements of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s post-Great Depression New Deal, be adapted for the UK today. Bright listed the achievements of the WPA: 3,500 branch libraries created, 4,400 musical performances every month by the Federal Music Project, a collection of oral histories collated which featured the narratives of the last living slaves. He also cited some of WPA’s beneficiaries: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning and writers such as Saul Bellow, John Cheever and Ralph Ellison.

In an effort to devise plans for job creation in the creative sector, NDotM borrows and adapts elements from Roosevelt’s original New Deal. NDotM are pushing for government policy that encourages self-employment and freelance opportunities -- the lifeblood of the creative industries -- such as the reintroduction of something similar to the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Under Margaret Thatcher’s government, long term unemployed people were offered £40 a week and free business advice while they set up a business. The EAS famously helped figures including Creation Records founder Alan McGee, Superdry’s creator Julian Dunkerton and artists Tracey Emin and Jane and Louise Wilson.

New Deal of the Mind has successfully lobbied for the return of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and borrows and adapts from both the EAS and WPA to push for government policy that encourages self-employment and freelance opportunities – the lifeblood of the creative industries. We’re working with the Government to help put unemployed people into creative placements in arts and culture and we’re finding spaces across the UK which will become "incubator centres" providing space, support and advice for people setting up on their own.

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