Empty bins are great, but only a rubbish nation fails to support the arts

There’s a moment in the David Ireland play The Fifth Step – a favourite at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival – when the character played by Jack Lowden starts ripping the set to bits. As he punches through wall panels, tearing them from their fastenings, things are, it seems, beginning to fall apart. It’s a neat representation of the character’s volatile mental state – and a depressingly fitting metaphor for what is happening in Scottish arts.

I catch the show on its closing night and, after Lowden and his co-star Sean Gilder lap up their standing ovation, director Finn den Hertog appears from the wings. He’s a freelancer, he says, and a decision Creative Scotland made earlier in the week to shut off funding for individuals is going to screw over people like him. In a protest being replicated in venues across the city, den Hertog urges audience members to write to their MSP to demand they act. #noartwithoutartists is the rallying call.

Arts organisations have been warning for years that the sector is heading for collapse, with stagnant funding and rocketing prices making it harder and harder for them to survive. At SNP conference last year then first minister Humza Yousaf made a grand gesture towards the industry, promising an additional £100m in funding over five years. The money, predictably enough, has failed to materialise and the concern is it never will. 

Creative Scotland – the development body that hands out money on the government’s behalf – has already warned there will not be enough cash to go round when it finally announces its highly delayed three-year funding round in October. Numerous organisations are likely to be hit. Now, with the government “unable to confirm” the money Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals requires, that pot has been closed to new applicants. 

It is the mark of a culture sector in crisis, but it is not just the arts that are being hit. iPads for the digitally excluded, money for nature restoration, free prescriptions, road upgrades – everything, it seems, is up for grabs. In the face of soaring public sector pay bills – and of having to deal with overflowing bins if pay demands had not been met – everything else is being made to suffer. It is a problem entirely of the SNP government’s own making.   

Exactly a year ago I interviewed the Auditor General for Scotland, and he told me that, with its soaring expenses bill, the Scottish Government better reform the public sector and it better reform it fast. It is a message that has been hammered home since Campbell Christie published his eponymous government-commissioned report on the issue in 2011, and Stephen Boyle was beginning to get exasperated. With the gap between its income and the very many things it wants to spend it on widening, the government had, he said, talked the talk about wanting to find better ways of functioning but had failed to walk the walk. “Getting there is the hard part,” he noted.

First Minister John Swinney is being urged to stop the cuts to arts funding in Scotland | Alamy

And now here we are, with a bloated, unreformed public sector and not enough money to pay for anything but the most essential of essentials. The Scottish Government, as per, is blaming Westminster, saying it doesn’t get enough cash to fund all the things it wants to. But as that has always been the moan then it has always been the case, so why has the Scottish Government never learned to manage its money better, to live within its means? As the Scottish Fiscal Commission says: “While UK Government policies contribute to the pressures on the Scottish budget, much of the pressure comes from the Scottish Government’s own decisions.”

When he made his £100m promise last year, Yousaf congratulated himself on his “huge vote of confidence” in the arts. “If politics is about choices, I choose to ensure that Scotland’s arts and culture are supported to grow at home, and be seen across the world,” he said.

At the time of writing, the SNP is gearing up for its 2024 conference. Having hidden away in Aberdeen for the past few years, this time the do is in Edinburgh, slap bang in the middle of a city still ringing with artists’ anger. Last year Yousaf said that “culture is a reflection of who we are, and who we hope to be as a people”. His successor, John Swinney, is going to have to pull something massive out of the bag this year. If he doesn’t, as a people, all we’re going to have left is empty bins.