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The idea that arthouse is the opposite of commercial is simply wrong. Lots of films that are marketed to a wide mass audience fail to make a profit. By contrast, pretty well every single one of Ken Loach's films sell all over the world, taking in good money from most of continental Europe - something that most UK 'commercial' films conspicuously fail to do.

Loach works on low budgets, and judging from Box Office Mojo, the vast majority of his recent films have more than recouped - a batting average that the commercially-oriented Hollywood studios could never dream of matching.

Commercially, both Loach and Marshall are successful directors. The only difference between the two is that most private equity is much more interested in investing in big-budget productions - the overheads on a huge slate of Loach films would simply be too high.

If public funding ceased overnight, Marshall would still get financed. Loach would not. Giving the latter's (paltry) financing to the former, where it would be just a drop in a huge ovean, would be an utterly ineffecient waste of resources and only serve to shrink the UK film industry as a whole.

This isn't about commerciality - see the UKFC's final curtain with King's Speech. This is about a growing culture of philistinism in the UK, implicity encouraged by much of the press, that denounces anything with any intellectual or artistic merit as 'uncommercial' - often in blatant disregard of the hard numbers.