Inside Arts

A Budget boost for the creative sector leaves Brian Ferguson feeling sceptical

It would be churlish during this season of goodwill not to give credit where it is due. A 10 per cent increase in Scotland’s culture budget was a welcome tonic for the arts sector after an extended period of doom and gloom over the last few months as storm clouds gathered over the prospect of impending funding cuts.

By last week, finance secretary Derek Mackay’s budget announcement had become the most hyped cultural event of the year.

So low were expectations over the nation’s culture budget that a “standstill” scenario settlement for the vast majority of arts sectors has been hailed as some kind of Christmas miracle.

Like a fairy godmother making a dramatic late entrance from the wings, Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop seemed to sweep in to rescue Scotland.

In fact, the Scottish Government and Creative Scotland created an illusion worthy of the finest pantomimes - that their heroic efforts have rescued the nation’s arts and culture from oblivion.

I was predicting to anyone who would listen that an Armageddon narrative was being carefully created to allow the Scottish Government, in particular, to look as if it had saved the day. Nothing has happened to disabuse me of the notion.

The great imponderable is whether culture would have received the same deal without those apocalyptic warnings from Creative Scotland and a host of leading arts organisations reliant on the quango’s financial support.

I suspect they made not a jot of difference especially if Creative Scotland had made the Scottish Government fully aware of the impact of its decline in National Lottery income before it alerted dozens of organisations to start preparing for the worst.

There is something disquieting about the concern, distress, fear and alarm that has spread through the Scottish arts sector in recent months.

Has this been actively encouraged by Creative Scotland in the knowledge that the government would “step in” after almost a year’s worth of talks with civil servants and Ms Hyslop? If it has, the whole thing has been an utter charade.

There are several key things worth bearing in mind amid all the backslapping and fawning.

Firstly, half of the increase - worth almost £20 million - in Ms Hyslop’s total budget was announced and allocated to Scotland’s film and TV industries in September, so is not exactly new. Secondly, the extra £6.6m a year for Creative Scotland in each of the next three years will simply “mitigate” the loss of that lottery income. With a further £2m ringfenced to allow the National Records of Scotland to deliver the 2021 Census that does not leave much extra cash to go around.

SNP MSP Joan Mcalpine, chair of the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party group on culture, helpfully pointed out that it makes up just 0.5 per cent of the government’s total budget. With the creative industries worth £4.5 billion and supporting 84,000 jobs, one can only imagine what could be achieved with a genuinely bigger slice of the cake.

Frankly, the extra funding from the government is unlikely to help Creative Scotland get close to meeting the £153m worth of requests for three-year funding.

What seems to have been forgotten is that it will undoubtedly have tough decisions to make at the end of next month.

But whatever unfolds then, the government is well and truly off the hook.