Tony - I didn't read Anne's post as 'doom mongering', just voicing thoughts. She was, I think, trying to say that it might kick-start local businesses into realising what the Festival had done for them all these years.

Here is a tale from another angle...

I know of a Festival which has been organised by and funded by a LA for a number of years, and was under a threat of discontinuation because of withdrawal of funding a few years ago. Okay - it wasn't a massive, international event like Sidmouth, but it was very well attended and enormously respected, by punters and performers alike.

When this threat became very very real, many of the punters and performers said - oh well, we'll come anyway and it'll still take place, just in a less formal format. But this, as the organisers pointed out, would have just proven that withdrawing the funding made no difference - the town would still have got the income from the festival without the expenditure. As it happened, the funding continued so the situation didn't arise...