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The discourse of ‘creative industries,’ conceived in the UK and
strongly associated with the incoming ‘New’ Labour government has been
exported around the world with an effectiveness and rapidity that many UK
based cultural producers would envy. As such, it is often portrayed as a
quintessentially neoliberal project, harnessing cultural production to an
economic agenda derived from notions of the knowledge economy. This paper
argues that the discourse in fact has a more complicated political a and
social heritage, mixing idea from the social democratic politics of the
Third Italy, with Californian techno-libertarianism and that, in practice,
this mixed heritage has hugely complicated the practical intervention
undertaken under the rubric of ‘creative industries.’  The paper
will examine the example of policymaking in London over the last decade to
explore these issues.Find more about Kate Oakley here.