The popinjays in charge of culture in Scotland speak the wrong language

Twice in the old days I won awards to pursue my historical researches. One time it was to study the papers of Henry Dundas, Scotland’s foremost politician of the 18th century. A great part of them had been sold at auction to American universities during the 1920s when the Dundases, like many Scottish landed families, fell on hard times. After my funded tour of the US, I could complete my standard biography of the great man (no, he did not organise the Highland clearances, and no, he did not support the slave trade).

The second grant was to study the papers of Alexander McGillivray, lodged at the Archivo de Indias, the Spanish imperial archives, in Seville. The McGillivrays were exiled Jacobites who had fled to pre-revolutionary America, gone to ground on the Appalachian frontier and then, by a process too complex to describe here, risen to be paramount chiefs of the Creek nation, of which the territory roughly covered the modern state of Alabama. Because the Creeks fought on the British side in the War of Independence, they were afterwards dispossessed and lost their ancestral lands to white settlers. It is a fascinating if obscure story, though when I sent the finished text to American publishers they said, “But this is British history!” And when I sent it to British publishers they said, “But this is American history!” So the book still sits in the innards of my computer waiting to get out.

I rehearse this experience in order to show how little the former SAC was geared to rapid results from a world of instant gratification. It had as its guiding spirit on the literary side a gentleman of the old school, Walter Cairns. In his job there was no fame or fortune for himself, but this never bothered him. He was devoted selflessly to the success of Scottish letters, and actually became, in his modest and kindly way, one of the most significant figures in the national culture at the end of the 20th century. The Edinburgh Book Festival was in essence his idea, as was the Scottish Poetry Library, as was the Canongate Classics series.

One reason he offered himself as a benefactor to me lay in the fact we agreed history should be a branch of literature, not of sociology or statistics as is usually the case in the philistine academic Scotland of today. And so, after leisurely and agreeable conversations in the offices of SAC, I got my grants.

It’s a far cry from Walter Cairns to some of the popinjays who people the arts establishment today. An example was Andrew Dixon, who crossed the Border from Newcastle to become the inaugural chief executive of Creative Scotland in 2010. After a couple of years he was gone again, as a result of public criticism by many of our writers for his “confusing and intrusive management style”, not to speak of his “ill-conceived decision-making and a lack of empathy and regard for Scottish culture”. I read that as saying he was an Englishman displaying the usual ignorance of Scotland’s ways of doing things, and not caring. Brash and trendy, he burst in on a cosy cultural scene too settled in its ways for him – yet not to be browbeaten.

His successor, Janet Archer, has in her turn just resigned. She was different from him, but no better. She had come from the English Arts Council, with little previous experience of Scotland. Her skills, such as they were, lay in the administrative manipulation of a system of subsidy and patronage.

This is no doubt what made her attractive to the great and good Scots who appointed her. After all, much else in our country is run on subsidy and patronage, and by people like them.

Here is a sample of what she had to say during a car-crash session with the culture committee of the Scottish Parliament, in the wake of furious protests from artists, writers and cultural groups after the distribution of the loaves and fishes for 2018. She is talking about one of the criteria for this kind of activity: “We work geographically in many different ways. There is a new initiative to accelerate how we work in relation to places, but we already have place partnerships with a large number of local authorities, which are set out on our website.

“Those involve co-investing against match funding from local authorities, which makes our resource go further. It is a bottom-up approach. We work with communities to help to develop their aspirations in the arts.”

Archer’s presentation to the committee contained many such passages of mysterious gobbledegook, all adding to the impression of an outfit where the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Creative Scotland had sunk to the level of displeasing almost everybody – hardly a desirable posture for what is supposed to be a fairy godmother.

It would be fair to add that Archer was at the time under critical questioning from MSPs who had their own local agendas to press. “What about Ayr?’ said one, “What about the Borders?” said another, “What about West Dunbartonshire?” said a third. Of course it is part of the job of politicians to represent the interests of their constituents, but in this case the profusion of special pleading lost sight of any concept of culture in the country as a whole. Here, instead, was the familiar pork-barrel in action.

Producers of culture, if I may borrow the committee’s cant, are lonely people. While other workers enjoy the fellowship of the office or the factory or the canteen, we have to sit on our own for hours on end with only a laptop for company. The wife is trained to keep out of the study and the kids are told to shush, or nowadays are bribed to do so with the latest computer game.

Every so often periods of writer’s block still arrive. Then the only thing for it is to summon a bosom buddy and go out on the randan for a few hours (or days). This needs to be done in a city, where there are good pubs, where you can meet more of your mates and where, if you slump into a gutter, there is somebody to pick you up. That’s why the literary life of Scotland gets concentrated in Edinburgh and Glasgow, not in Auchtermuchty or Lesmahagow.

Yet one of Creative Scotland’s more ridiculous aims, as revealed in Archer’s testimony, is to spread cultural activity in an absolutely even layer all over the country.

In this it fully conforms with the declared purposes of the Scottish Government, and its desire for equality in everything. The two sides may have their tiffs, but are at one in this essential. We can tell as much from the way they express their agreement in the same official jargon, impenetrable to outsiders but presumably transparent to them. They are talking to each other, yet past the artists they are supposed to represent and help.

All this is in general a world away from the language (or rather the three languages: English, Scots, Gaelic) of the rest of us in Scotland. We are a nation skilled in the use and usage of languages: when to switch from one to another, which register to adopt in each, what vocabulary to deploy. This is, apart from anything else, a vital basis of our rich national literature. It is also why we find the official jargon so ugly, colourless and rebarbative.

The language problem represents a reality underneath, of a nation rather different from what its political class and its cultural bureaucracy believe or want it to be.

Till this situation improves, Creative Scotland will continue to be the opposite of what its name suggests.