The Gold Plated Promise

The Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals has been a huge enabler of my music making over the years. Since 2016 it has supported no less than six albums and a couple of other projects by bands and collaborations with which I’m involved. 

I think it’s true for many folk, myself included, that recorded music doesn’t make money fast, if at all. More than half the records those bands released won’t have come close to covering their costs through sales and royalties, and some possibly never will. 

But releasing music is essential on other fronts, not least that having a current album is increasingly essential to be able to book gigs and make cash. The fund enabled that, as well as getting the music out there, and growing the profile of those projects. Despite not being particularly profitable, it’s not like the music isn’t being heard and enjoyed – there’s a few million streams across that catalogue by now, and we’ve heard from folk all over the world who’ve connected to such an extent that they’ve taken the time to get in touch and share their experiences. 

Beyond that, I couldn’t even attempt to count the number of additional projects – performing, recording, education and cross – art form that I’ve been involved in, through essentially being employed by other recipients of the fund. It is a pretty significant source in terms of how I’ve made a living over the years.

Lots of folk have made this point in recent days – that recipients of the fund spend the vast majority of it employing other individual creators of various sorts to bring their projects to life. It underpins an entire ecosystem – of collaboration, the creation of art and opportunities for people to engage with it; but also an economy, which keeps many artists and creative folk going. 

So it’s a devastating loss, and from a policy point of view it’s hard to work out how we’ve ended up here. 

A couple of years ago I was working in the policy side of the  Scottish cultural sector, latterly as Advocacy Manager for Culture Counts. Over that time I had an amount of involvement in conversations on how policy for arts and culture is made and funded, including the campaign around the 10% cut to Creative Scotland first mooted at the end of 2022, and then subsequent work somewhat connected to the talk (but as yet no action) of a £100 million uplift to culture budgets. I’m no longer working in that world, but the experience has left me with a few burning thoughts in relation to where we find ourselves.

It’s notable that historically, Scottish Government has not been the main source of funding for the Open Fund for Individuals. It primarily distributes funds from the National Lottery – receipts from lottery tickets. In 22/23, Creative Scotland’s Open Funds for Individuals and Organisations awarded £15.7mil in funding, of which £0.6mil was funded directly by the Scottish Government. 

Lottery receipts have been dwindling in recent years. In 17/18, Creative Scotland received around £30mil in lottery income to support its open funds, in 2023 it received £32 mil. That’s a fairly flat trend in cash terms, and given inflation, the amount of money available to support individual artists from this stream has decreased significantly and continues to do so. For some time there has been a need for a serious conversation about the amount of money needed to support individual artists, and whether the Government should assume greater responsibility for this. 

Holyrood’s Culture Committee produced a report on this back in 2019 entitled Putting Artists In The Picture: A Sustainable Arts Funding System For Scotland, which articulated these longer standing issues and gave a series of (mostly ignored) recommendations. 

All this is to say that there is not even close to enough money to go around. Arts in Scotland are truly falling off the cliff that various parts of the sector have been warning about since the latter stages of the pandemic. In addition to the ending of its support for individual artists, Creative Scotland will soon make decisions on the future of  119 cultural organisations it currently provides regular funding to, as well as 161 additional organisations who have applied for regular support. The total funding ask of those 280 organisations is £87.4mil. There has been no word of how much money will be made available by the Government to meet this demand, but this year’s organisation pot is £32.5mil. If this is not significantly increased, it’s fair to assume that theatres, festivals, venues, education projects and others will start closing their doors. 

Despite many warm words, the Government’s cash allocation to Creative Scotland has followed a similar trend to National Lottery receipts. It’s fluctuated a bit, but it’s certainly not kept pace with inflation. £1 in 2017 money is worth about 77p now. It’s remarkable that that reduction in investment has not seen a corresponding fall in activity and output by Scotland’s artists and cultural organisations. 

But the Government line that’s appeared in the press in recent days is laughable. They say “we continue to provide significant funding to Creative Scotland”. A tiny amount of that “significant” funding makes its way directly to individual artists as a means of plugging a hole in another dwindling income stream, and the value of that support has fallen by more than a fifth in recent years. 

This particular nugget of media messaging is the latest in a long and sad litany of confusing, counterfactual and counterproductive communiques from Scottish Government. Ostensibly, they see themselves as leaders on Culture, having undertaken a huge number of policy and strategy exercises in recent years,  including but not limited to a cultural strategy, a cultural strategy action plan, a cultural strategy action plan refresh, a major events strategy and an international cultural strategy.

Just some examples of the Government repeatedly acknowledging that Scottish art and artists are important to our economy and society, and central to how the Government seeks to define Scotland’s place in the world. On that latter point, many folk working right across the arts, certainly in trad music have been involved in various soft power exercises. I’ve been all over the shop at home and abroad playing at festivals and events tied in to the activities of current and former Cabinet Secretaries and First Ministers selling brand Scotland. 

Yet every funding decision made in recent years runs counter to this narrative. In a longer-term context of standstill funding, take that 10%, roughly £6mil cut to Creative Scotland. Over the past two years the cut has been announced, campaigned against, cancelled, re-imposed, and despite a “gold plated” promise from Angus Robertson, the Open Fund for individuals has been closed because of £6.6mil withheld in year by the Government.  That particular fish is still flipping and flopping, and individual artists, the skint, overworked engine of the Scottish cultural machine are the first to be left carrying the can.  

It’s hard to imagine how the Government could have caused any more damage with this cut if they tried. Beyond the financial, the impact on people’s wellbeing, mental health, morale and confidence in the viability of arts and culture in Scotland has been profound. And all that for six million quid, which with some back-of-fag-packet maths, represents roughly 3.5 hours worth of the yearly Scottish income tax take. At this point I genuinely think we’d be in a better state if they’d just made the cut and said nothing further at all – we’d at least know where we stand. And that’s to say nothing of the fabled £100mil that’s supposedly forthcoming in the next five years. It’s been being talked about for a year now, but still the brass-tacks situation continues to worsen. 

Restoring the withheld £6mil to Creative Scotland’s budget might get the open fund flowing again, but that is not nearly enough. In its current form, demand will continue to vastly outstrip supply. Creative Scotland recently indicated that they only have the money to support 25-30% of applications to the fund. And the same will soon go for cultural organisations. More cash is desperately needed, now, to keep the majority of the Scottish cultural sector – artists and the infrastructure that supports them in business beyond the end of the financial year. 

These are tiny amounts of money in the grand scheme of what the Government spends. The national budget for 24/25 stands at £59.7 billion, the money budgeted to Creative Scotland is £68.5 million, 0.11% of that. Even if the fabled £100mil was brought forward entirely, that proportion would be rising to just 0.28% of total spend. 

And of course this is how it should be. There’s no denying the challenges on every front across our economy and society – health, social care, education, local government and essential services face huge problems, many of them financial. But the Government’s position on culture has become untenable – it either needs to put up or shut up. 

You can follow Joseph’s work and music HERE.

See also:

Living in an Un-Creative Scotland – Bella Caledonia

Open Letter to John Swinney, Kate Forbes and Angus Robertson – Bella Caledonia

No Arts without Artists – Bella Caledonia

Supporting the Eco-System of Scottish Culture – Bella Caledonia

Comments (25)

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  1. MacGilleRuadh says:

    This is a peach of a whine. Let’s all agree that we need to prioritise and while we have our people dying on the streets for lack of resources it is not a great idea to be funding Joseph et al.

    1. SleepingDog says:

      @MacGilleRuadh, when “my poor mental health” is coupled with a demand, I always associate this with emotional blackmail, for some reason. And sometimes a guilty conscience. Ah, life experience, I guess.

      While if advertising is making us unhappier by ratcheting up our dissatisfaction and worries about body image (not to mention fears over immigration), why is the advertising sector the jewel in the Crown of the Scottish government’s (very neoliberal-sounding) creative industries economic plan?

      One quote stood out to me in this article on some relevant University of Warwick research:
      “That’s partly why advertising hurts group happiness; there’s only so much status to go around.”
      https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
      That could easily apply to what professional artists want, of course. I’m not sure how many would step over bodies in the street to get it, of course, even if they’d say they would.

    2. Wul says:

      Are people “dying on our streets” because artists have taken all the money?

      All those things we can no longer afford. The list gets longer every year.

      In a country that, until fairly recently, received wealth from 40% of the occupied globe. And still brokers around 25% of all global money that needs hidden away. Where did all the wealth go?

      Maybe we blew it all on community theatre, forgetting to feed and clothe ourselves first?

      1. SleepingDog says:

        @Wul, I think it’s much worse than that. George Monbiot offers this morsel in an article worth reading about what artists *really* do in this country, and who they work for (whoever pays best, in many cases, apparently).
        “Among others, they pay a BBC in-house content studio to make their films. The BBC’s offer of ‘our century-long pedigree as the world’s most trusted storytellers’ can be used to massage the reputations of the fossil fuel and pesticide companies it now works for.”
        https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/28/dear-ministers-i-am-a-climate-crisis-campaigner-nationalise-me-right-now

        Now, a case could be made for arts elitism. I’m not sure Bella has managed to make that case, but it sure is pushing it (and I’ve long opposed the Cult of the Artist we find here). But it is far more difficult to argue for state-funded arts elitism, especially during our global polycrisis, which is driven in large part by the artistry of those pushing overconsumption, fossil fuelled lifestyles, and political campaigns which do nothing to address the read problems while making them worse.

        1. Wul says:

          Thanks for the link. Will read it.

    3. Frank Mahann says:

      UK citizens dying in our streets. Victims of the ‘precious union’.

  2. WT says:

    Joseph I am not one to be particularly disappointed by the withdrawal of this fund. You have obviously benefitted from it over the years but it seems obvious from what you say that you are ‘in the circle’. There are many artists, good artists, who get no funding but they still produce work. No one seems to give a toss about them. From what you say you have been in receipt of this funding many times thus blocking someone else from receiving help from this limited pot, do you think that’s fair? You are in the world of creating music but many good innovative musicians get no help whatsoever – they have to release their music on the likes of Bandcamp, or have to release their stuff at their own expense. Some great musical talents on Bandcamp have less than a couple of hundred sales worldwide – does a grant help people buy? Does a grant help people appreciate? I know that the withdrawal of this money will make it hard for you, and for that I’m sorry for you personally, but this should never have been a source of income that you could rely on. A grant is a job, creativity comes from the heart.

    1. Paddy Farrington says:

      Would you say the same if it were pure mathematics we were talking about?

      1. WT says:

        I’m sorry Paddy but I don’t understand your comment. If you think I’m against the arts and for the sciences then that’s not the case. I come from a musical family some employed in the industry as far afield as rock and folk. My wife is an artist who sells as best she can, I’m a zero hours contract guy working with the elderly. I just think that there are better things to spend time groaning about cuts particularly when noone seemed to bother that much with £30million in cuts to mental health services.

        1. Paddy Farrington says:

          My question was motivated by the powerful societal bias in favour of STEM subjects, which I feel inhabits this whole discussion. Politically, it gets us nowhere to justify cutting funding for the arts or for individual artists: it’s just divide and rule. We should be arguing that the sixth largest economy in the world can afford to fund both mental health services and the arts properly. But more than that, everything is connected… and perhaps with better funding for arts and culture there might be less call on mental health services.

          1. WT says:

            Thanks Paddy, I take your point. And I have to return to the main problem we face is simply that we are not an independent nation. Choices can be made up here without proper accountability – it’s easy to divert blame by following the WM leader. Cuts are not the only answer, but we have governments here and there (WM) to afraid (or ideologically opposed) to making other choices.

          2. SleepingDog says:

            @Paddy Farrington, where is your evidence for “the powerful societal bias in favour of STEM subjects” you claim is somehow behind the argument against selective state-funding of adult professional artists?

            I’m aware that a long-running lack of STEM backgrounds in key decision-making groups in society has been a concern. I couldn’t find up-to-date breakdowns of graduate subjects for todays MSP and MPs, but here is a 2021 piece from the LSE on MPs which seems typical:
            “Of the 541 MPs with higher education degrees in the 2015-2017 Parliament, only 93 (17%) held degrees in STEM subjects; for comparison, 46% of UK students in 2019 graduated in STEM subjects. This lack of scientific experience among MPs is at odds with the increasing pertinence of scientific issues and techniques to political decision-making.”
            https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/stem-mps-pmbs/

            I think your ‘feeling’ is merely your own prejudice.

            Furthermore, you claim others are being divisive, but consider: treating professional artists differently from general population is divisive; awarding grants to some artists and not others is divisive; pitting STEM against The Arts is divisive (and you do all these). In addition, separate schools for the socially-cheating elite is divisive. Whereas I, for example, am arguing that state funding for the arts is best done for everybody at the state comprehensive school level. Otherwise you can get effect described by George the Poet: kids polished by private education get the bulk of the awards.

            Casting this in terms of ‘the sixth largest economy in the world’ is a sign of neoliberalism and imperialism (you’re not talking about Scotland here, are you? Yet we’re supposed to be talking about Scottish state policy).

            As I’ve explained earlier, research suggests that advertising is a significant contributor to poor mental health, and of course every minute hastens our devouring, heating and poisoning of our planet through over-consumption, burning and reckless pollution. The persistent refusal to acknowledge the vast number of artists in the advertising sector is typical of the arguments in bad faith going on by your side.

            It is a foul misconstruction to claim those opposed to select state-funding of (typically professional, adult) artists are anti-arts. All the arguments I’ve heard in favour so far seem likely to be counter-productive, giving the strong impression that those in favour are a bunch of narcissistic artholes lacking in empathy, failing to read the room, and content to argue in bad faith. I suspect this is not the entire case, but why give that impression?

          3. Paddy Farrington says:

            Sleeping Dog, the STEM versus Art (false) dichotomy is well known and deeply entrenched. A one-minute online search yielded this:

            https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/174745/1/10.1177_14740222231156893.pdf

            And as for lacking in empathy, well…

          4. SleepingDog says:

            @Paddy Farrington, yet your 1-minute search seems to have missed the point that the paper is about “the last decade education policy in England”, while:
            “It is important to note first that both educational policy and cultural policy have been devolved to UK member countries since the late 1990s. Scotland and Wales have taken a strategic approach to education policy with over-arching policy narratives that emphasise inclusivity in economic growth, social inclusion, a reduction of inequality and long-term sustainability”

            As I have repeatedly advocated science fiction and computer games as arts particularly helpful in modelling futures, both of which combine STEM and arts subjects at a fundamental level, and promoted the fantasy art form in particular as a sometimes-helpful means of modelling coexistence, whose modern videography relies heavily on computer-generated imagery, I could hardly be reasonably accused of pushing a STEM versus Arts agenda myself. The idea that the games industry doesn’t really employ actors has been recently mocked by the Guardian among others: https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/aug/28/age-of-mythology-god-of-strategy-games

            Your argument seems to be based on an apparently fictitious notion that pure mathematicians are selected for government grants by a parallel but better-funded state organ to Creative Scotland. Before you say it, this is not the same as PhDs, which associated with universities and fee-based.

            Who primarily creates the Cult of the Artist but artists themselves? For some relevant comments, see George Orwell’s Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (reprinted in Penguin’s Orwell and Politics). Orwell takes exception to both art-‘philistines’ and art-exceptionalists. However, Orwell doesn’t in the essay ask why artists are considered exceptional, which would surely take us into Cold War culture wars and beyond.

            As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Cornel West described artists like Ella Fitzgerald as a distinctive wave in an ocean, a clever way of saying artists can be distinctive but are not exceptional, preserving a socialist outlook rather than caving in to arts-elitism. But if artists were exceptional for some reason, perhaps you believe artists will bring about world peace or something, then why support only Scottish artists? Why not use state funds to support artists worldwide in a nation-blind way (like the CIA did, oops)?

          5. Paddy Farrington says:

            So let’s hope that Scotland’s youth has moved on a bit…

          6. SleepingDog says:

            @Paddy Farrington …and get the credit they deserve, collectively at least. Interesting story:
            https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/13/vivaldi-taught-venetian-orphan-girls-did-they-help-write-his-music-in-return

  3. Ali says:

    Cuts to the arts in Scotland is a tragedy, no doubt about it. But, really, blaming the Scottish Government for a lack of funding is like blaming the weather for global warming.

    Scotland as part of Brexit Britain is a dead duck. It has no control over its own economy and no control over its own resources. If you want the arts to be properly funded, and everything else for that matter, you need Scotland to be independent and self-governing. It really is that simple.

    The best thing we can all do is get our act together and start pushing for independence. That’s the only way that Scotland will ever produce the finances that allow us to give fair distribution of wealth across all areas of our society. Otherwise, we stay in the UK and rot.

  4. Satan says:

    Artists like John Cooper Clarke, Alexi Sayle and Mark E Smith wouldn’t touch government benefits with a cattle-prod. If your not good enough, get a job with Tesco, or the Scottish government.

    1. I don’t think I’ve ever removed anyone just for being thoroughly unpleasant but happy to make an exception with you. Every single comment is just relentlessly negative and unpleasant. You can go do this somewhere else now.

    2. Frank Mahann says:

      Toodle pip, Auld Horniee!

  5. Observer says:

    The “put up or shut up” line is important here. All fiscal rules being equal, the new U.K. government has accepted the big National Insurance cuts which have helped average workers pay their rising rent and mortgage costs. Even under the leftish Humza, the SNP calculated that social democracy is for the good times and froze the council tax yet again.

    Unfortunately, individual artist funding falls very low on most people’s priority list, and what arts money there is will doubtless be snaffled by the high profile organisations with buildings to run.

    15 years of low economic growth, an expensively ageing population and the spiralling cost of Social Security Scotland’s relative generosity mean we are now in the world of hard choices.

    In that world, artists can never expect much government help- it would be nice for the Scottish Government to admit that, but don’t hold your breath…

    1. Alec Lomax says:

      Scotland can only do so much with pocket money it gets from Westminster.

  6. Al campize a traz says:

    Just give folk a bloke of wood or a dod of clay, that should keep them out of harm’s way .

  7. Al campize a traz says:

    That’s not a typo, a wooden bloke would serve folk well, unlike alcohol when typing.

  8. SleepingDog says:

    Was my last comment caught in the spam filter because it included a .co.uk link? Pity. It tied together so-called alternative British comedy, Thatcher’s aid to self-employed plumbers, an Alexei Sayle quote, whether stand-up comics see themselves are artists, and a small splash of humility. But the question I ended on is worth repeating: does targeted state funding of the arts accelerate change or impede it?

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