How we respond to the rhetoric around ‘new funding’ matters. The more we experience processing fluency – accepting something is true because we hear it a lot – the less likely we are to be proactive in ensuring theatre is truly hardwired into government strategy.

A similar positive rhetoric is being deployed around the potential effect of devolution on arts funding. But beware processing fluency! The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill doesn’t specify future investment in culture. I’ve written before that I suspect government’s response to straitened finances will be a closer concentration of arts funding to ACE NPOs. And Ian Murray MP’s hyping of what devolution might promise to arts funding does little to reassure theatremakers who believe culture is being left to fend for itself in the race to build local-centric investment.

How do we avoid the feeling of being hoodwinked by political rhetoric into believing that blue skies are around the corner?

Culture is not hardwired into local government funding priorities, and – as arts leaders have pointed out – the continued rise of the Reform party across the UK doesn’t offer any promise to culture at all. Reform has said very little about the arts, other than calling for tighter government management of the BBC.

And for touring theatre companies, too little has been said about how touring will thrive if funding is increasingly encouraged to be local-first.

How do we avoid the feeling of being hoodwinked by political rhetoric into believing that blue skies are around the corner? By proactively inserting theatre, and not just culture, into the political narrative. And by inserting theatre not just in the narrative, but in the policy formation. An opportunity awaits: government is currently seeking feedback on its proposals for a tourism tax. The idea is not popular in the hospitality sector, which has already been hammered by rising employment costs and falling revenues. However, a tourism tax could bring long-term benefits to both hospitality and culture – but only if we write ourselves into the reality.

The ‘bumper package’ announcement demonstrates how easy it is for theatre to perceive its inclusion in arts policy decisions – but the reality shows how limited the benefits are to most grassroots theatremakers.

Just as we’re seeing an assumption that culture will benefit from devolution, there’s an assumption that culture is a given beneficiary in any proposed tourism levy. But repeated statements from government that ‘culture is important to tourism’ is not the same as guaranteeing an additional top-up to theatre funding.

A tourism tax could truly be a source of ‘new funding’ for culture. But, for this to happen, theatremakers need to respond to the consultation and make the case not only for the tax itself, but for theatre to directly and additionally benefit from the dividends.