You cannot feed a nation on culture and sport, but you can nourish it

The government should help us enrich our lives with a little circus, even when bread is in short supply
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mo farah olympics london 2012
Like the Olympics, all kinds of events can provide excitement, inspiration and opportunity, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

It would be churlish not to flash a welcoming grin at the third-quarter figures indicating 1% growth. But it would be unwise to throw even a modest party to celebrate. David Cameron was criticised for hinting about "good news" at prime minister's questions on Wednesday. But since increased government spending accounts for a big chunk of the rise (0.4%), one could be forgiven for concluding that Cameron must therefore have been thrilled by his own ideological failure.

Yet that analysis is neither entirely constructive nor wholly truthful. Employment is up, and it is significant that much of this is part-time or low-paid employment. No ideological failure there. The Conservatives have always maintained that any work is better than no work at all (unless that work happens to be in the public sector) and that benefits are a disincentive. Like it or not, there are signs that people are now accepting jobs that they may not have taken in the past. It's hardly implausible to suggest that this is one consequence of austerity measures. Similarly, as Thomas Pascoe put it in the Telegraph: "Inflation is falling only because disposable incomes are now too pinched to be pulled further." All of this points to an economy in which people are surviving rather than thriving.

Add to this the fact that another 0.3% of the rise was down to financial services, and a picture emerges of an economy that is not rebalancing but simply retrenching, with the fallout from its failures becoming more and more extreme as people are protected less and less from those failures. The rich may not be getting richer at the dizzying pace they became used to – thanks mainly to the collapse of insane property value inflation – but the poor are still getting poorer.

The last quarter's increased government spending was in good part down to the Olympics – the credit for which Cameron and Boris Johnson virtually grappled over – while others are left to open food banks. From which it's easy to infer that the Conservatives are happier to provide circuses than they are to provide bread.

Now, depending how you define "circuses", the provision of them might not be such a terrible thing. Welfare spending provides people with some protection from the consequences of markets that don't match the availability of jobs to availability of workers. But it doesn't ever address underlying market problems. Gordon Brown's approach as a boom chancellor was as flawed in that respect as George Osborne's is as a bust chancellor. A straightforward rejection of "austerity" repeats Brown's mistake, while straightforward acceptance of it reacts against Brown's mistake, while addressing the actual problem not a jot more than he did.

The truth is that government spending has for many decades concentrated on damage limitation more than it has on solutions. The main change under the coalition is a withdrawal of measures that limit damage. Osborne's failure to provide a solution is widely acknowledged in the observation that he has "no plan B". My contention is this: the Olympics is a gigantic example of how the provision of circuses, in the stubborn absence of any other Plan B, might not be such a bad idea.

Baby boomers, before the 1970s came along and shattered the illusion, used to presume that in the future everyone would spend less time working and more time enjoying their leisure. A version of that future is now upon us, the snag being that the imagined leisure was monied and the actual leisure is hard up. Lots of people wouldn't mind working part-time if it gave them just enough cash to have a reasonable quality of life. It's time for the government – any government – to start thinking about how it can enrich modestly financed lives in ways that don't necessarily involve giving people just enough cash to eke out a miserable existence in front of the telly, for the hours that they're not at work.

Not that there's anything wrong with telly. Plenty of people were glued to their tellies during the Olympics, and not miserable in the least. Considering Britain has such a vast public broadcasting system, the potential for using the medium to create shared national experience has been hugely diluted by deregulation and competition. I'm not making a nostalgic complaint about the good old days when everyone across the land sat down on a Saturday evening to play their own small part in burnishing the status of the most audaciously manipulative paedophile in British history. I'm suggesting that there is already enough infrastructure in place for public service broadcasting, and many other public services, to become a great deal more focused on offering people opportunities cheaply to enrich their social lives. The nearest thing the UK has to a permanent circus is The X Factor. There's no reason why young people with all sorts of other talents can't be showcased in this way. I'd watch people battling it out to win drama competitions. And I don't see why only celebrities get the opportunity to improve their dancing skills as the nation watches.

There's already a strong movement towards the further democratisation of culture and sport. The Royal Opera House is now relaying live performances around the country. The National Theatre of Scotland is streaming plays online. Many people enjoy private events such as the Glastonbury festival without leaving their homes. People gather outside Wimbledon to watch the action inside the tennis club on a giant screen. Literature festivals have been established in the most unlikely towns. Free concerts and music festivals are flocked to, as are art galleries. Events such as Antony Gormley's Waste Man, in Margate, in 2006, offer local people a spectacle to remember for the rest of their lives.

None of this actually puts food in bellies. But, like the Olympics, all sorts of events can provide inspiration, excitement and opportunities, attract visitors, pull in sponsors. And volunteers. We don't hear much about the "big society" any more. But people would happily volunteer to help out at local arts and sports events, especially it they were rewarded with afternoon cinema vouchers, or off-peak travel passes, or festival tickets – stuff that gets people out of their homes, rather than entrapping them in their local area. And they'd have involvement in interesting stuff, not a bit of shelf-stacking, on their CVs.

Britain already has a fantastic arts and culture infrastructure, a good deal of success in exporting its wares to the rest of the English-speaking world, masses of job-seekers trained in the humanities, and a government department charged with promoting culture, media and sport. The BBC is at a point of crisis, and urgently needs to redefine its role. Theatre is booming, yet no permanent one-off drama slot appears to exist on any of the BBC's television channels any more. It should be seeking out such dramas, putting them on television, touring them round the country.

There are more ways than one of enriching Britain. The talent, the technology, the infrastructure and the expertise are already available.

Circuses can provide a lot of bread.

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