I fear that funding changes reveal loss of trust in artists

Arts Editor

Saturday 16 June 2012

For some years I seemed to sit at a point of change on the reporting staff of The Herald.

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Keith Bruce

Most of those older than I had come through training on local papers. Almost all of those younger had university degrees. These days, when people of my own vintage fall to reminiscing about our fortunate years in tertiary education, it is not long before someone remarks that we had the advantage of "something called a grant". Nowadays, as the world's financial systems collapse under mountains of debt, we train the next generation how the system that brought about this catastrophe works by giving students "loans" that will stalk them for years, and then increase tuition fees to make that crippling burden even greater.

The mild-mannered Canadian students in Quebec, you may have heard, have had enough and, coincident with the arrival of the Formula 1 caravanserai last weekend, made enough protesting noise to reach the attention of the international press. Besides being a very attractive cosmopolitan and cultural city, Montreal has always been a particularly attractive place to study because tuition fees were low. Not only is the resistance of the students to the proposed increases committed and sustained, it has also attracted a good deal of popular support among the wider public. I fancy that older generations in Scotland – and certainly mine – might prove equally supportive of combative student dissent here.We often look to Quebec for parallels with our own situation because of its semi-detached relationship with Canada and past plebiscites on complete separation. The national identity question seems to be difficult to invoke with regard to student fees, however, when young people coming to Scottish universities from across the Irish Sea are pragmatically picking up a new passport to ensure that they don't have to shell out more than they need. In the multi-cultural West, economic expediency beats ethnicity every time (in as much as the whole independence debate has anything at all to do with ethnicity, of course).The change in the approach to funding the education of our young people does worryingly seem to be a model for what is happening in the funding of the arts in Scotland, however. We have not had it so bad, we are often told, and so far that has been true. Theatre director James Brining, who has just moved to West Yorkshire Playhouse from Dundee Rep, observed to me at the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland on Sunday that the regime he was moving to had been much harder hit by cuts than has happened in Scotland – and his view echoes that of many arts practitioners north and south of the border, as well as voices in the Scottish Government.There have been as many, nonetheless, intoning (in the style of John Laurie as Dad's Army's Private Fraser) that our turn will come, and it is true that the change of language at Creative Scotland foretold that danger long before the announcement of its new funding structure drew the recent chorus of protest. As writer Kathleen Jamie observes in her interview in the new Scottish Review of Books, her generation benefited from (small) Scottish Arts Council grants that came with a trust that it would allow an artist to get on with their work. "And now," she eloquently continued, "it's 'investment' and corporate la-la."To poke fun at the change of terminology deployed by the functionaries at Creative Scotland – and I have been as guilty as any – is to miss the point that our tax and lottery monies are now being seen in a different way, and continuing control of it, even after it has been allocated, has been assumed by the new quango in a way the old arts council did not. Do we who fund Creative Scotland believe that artists – like, presumably, students – have become less trustworthy than they were in the 20th century? Because it appears that is what they think.

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I fear that funding changes reveal loss of trust in artists

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