Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2015
This has been a very enjoyable debate, and I want to address a number of the points that have been made during it.
I agree with Claire Baker’s amendment and appreciate the important points that she made about local and community festivals, but I am not sure that I agree with the idea of extending winter so that it starts at Hallowe’en—winter is too long and dark as it is. In the context of local festivals, she mentioned Kirkcaldy. Town centre festivals are important from a retail point of view, whether they are held during the winter or at other times of the year. I worked with Derek Mackay, and I am now working with Marco Biagi, on the town centre regeneration plan. Culture will form part and parcel of the process of ensuring that there is vibrant life in our town centres.
Claire Baker also talked about the need for wider promotion of our winter festivals. She mentioned China. I have already mentioned our reach. Many tourist bookings are still made on a group basis, so we have to promote among groups as well as individuals. There is a constant need for innovation and one of the most recent innovations was blogmanay, which was about bringing the world’s bloggers to Edinburgh to experience hogmanay so that they could tell others about it and generate more interest. That is a good example of being innovative.
I want to address some of the points that Liz Smith made. Although I do not agree with her amendment, I appreciate her arguments and understand where she is coming from. When it comes to how Scotland expresses itself in the modern day, she is absolutely right that the past year has generated a great deal of intellectual thought. That is something that will not go away, and we want to embrace it in an inclusive way. It has merit from the point of view of how we look at the wider issue of arts and culture. I think that it would be wrong to say that the winter festivals have not been successful because of the absence of a national arts strategy, precisely because of all the arguments that have been made about spontaneity, the connection with place, the partnerships that are involved and the local character of many of our festivals.
Liz Smith made the point that somehow there is a tension between the intrinsic value of the arts and the financial aspects, but I think that the real challenge for Scotland—which I think is one that we can meet—is that it is not an either/or scenario; we can have both. Why do I say that? I will give an example after I have given way to the member.