Art and politics

Entirely unbeknownst to me (I'm terribly out of date with happenings in my home town), the (once feted) Ipswich Art School building has reopened as a gallery of contemporary art with a loan from the Saatchi Gallery. Which is a really good thing. But something in this report from the BBC particularly struck me: the Councillor's comment that 'There's very little public money going into this' - as if spending on cultural projects = political death. Leaving personal ideologies aside, I somehow can't imagine the same sort of attitude under the former Labour-run Council. In the light of Jenny's last post, is this rather throw-away comment more significant that it, at first, appears? A likely sign of things to come?