The growing threat to Scotland’s £5.7 billion-a-year arts industry and why it matters to us all
Democracy depends on our ability to engage with complex ideas, understand different perspectives and hear voices that might otherwise go unheard
Throughout this election period, we have heard once again that the arts are vital to Scotland’s future. But beyond these familiar statements sits a more fundamental question about how any healthy democracy renews itself.
The language is familiar – politicians talk about the importance of culture. They speak about creativity, community and national identity. They recognise, often with great passion, that the arts matter. Yet the deeper test is not what is said during campaigns, but what is sustained afterwards.
This edict is reflected in pre-election commitments from both SNP and Scottish Labour to support artists’ incomes, drawing on models similar to Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts scheme. These are welcome interventions, particularly at a time when the cost of making a living in the sector is a real and growing challenge. But if that belief in culture is real, then the systems that help it remain truly meaningful must endure beyond election cycles.
Vital to democracy
After the votes have been counted, we enter a quieter reality. Funding tightens and risk aversion takes hold. This is when the work that is hardest to justify in narrow economic terms, and often hardest to make, is the first to come under pressure.
Theatre, and new playwrighting specifically, can play a vital role in a democratic society. Democracy depends on our ability to encounter perspectives beyond our own, to engage with complexity and to hear voices that might otherwise go unheard.
Across theatre, literature and screen, it is new work that most often creates that space. New writing brings forward stories that have not yet been shaped by consensus or familiarity. It resists repetition. It expands the frame.
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Supporting artists is essential, they are at the heart of everything we do. But a healthy ecology depends not just on individuals, but on the conditions that allow their work to exist and flourish.
Scotland’s reputation as a home for bold, internationally recognised theatre has been built over decades, through commitment to new writing. That commitment has allowed generations of artists to develop their work here and take it onto stages across the world. If all the world truly is a stage, then Scotland more than holds its own, consistently punching above its weight in the stories it tells and the artists it nurtures.
Asking the difficult questions
At the Traverse Theatre, Scotland’s national new writing company, this is the work we exist to do – supporting writers at different stages of their careers, and ensuring that new stories are not only developed but realised on stage and shared with audiences. This reflects a broader national ecosystem of organisations working in similar ways.
Bringing new stories like these to the stage is not easy. It requires time, investment, partnership and a willingness to take risks without any guarantee of return. That is precisely where their value lies: in their ability to ask difficult questions, to surface under-represented perspectives and to create moments of shared reflection in an increasingly divided public sphere.
The pressure on the sector can, at times, nudge us towards the safe, the known and the repeatable – work that demonstrates immediate return, rather than leaving room for longer-term value.
Across the UK, the number of new plays reaching the stage has declined over the past decade, with productions some 30 per cent lower since before the pandemic. Financial pressure, changing audience behaviour and the long tail of Covid have made it harder to take risks on untested work. The result is a slow narrowing of what gets made and whose voices are heard. Left unchecked, that narrowing has consequences.
A question of value
Too often, the value of culture is reduced to its economic contribution. This risks missing its deeper civic role. It is true that the arts contribute significantly to Scotland’s economy and international reputation, to the tune of £5.7 billion a year. But for those seeking public office, the question is not whether they value the arts in principle. It is whether they are willing to back the full ecosystem that allows new work to exist.
That means supporting artists, yes, but also investing in development, commissioning and production. It means recognising that risk is not a failure of the system, but a necessary part of it. And it means understanding that new writing cannot be turned on and off in response to short-term funding cycles without long-term consequences.
A belief in the value of culture cannot appear only in manifestos and campaign speeches. It has to be reflected in the decisions that follow.
Arts not ‘for them’?
As we wait for a new government to form, there is an opportunity to move beyond familiar statements of support and towards something more meaningful. Not just headline commitments, but long-term thinking about how cultural life is sustained across Scotland.
Last year, a survey revealed that less than one in four people think the arts in Britain are diverse. People from working-class backgrounds have a perception that the arts are not “for them”, and audiences are increasingly turned off by programming that fails to challenge the status quo.
Without new writing, theatre becomes a space of repetition rather than reflection. It tells us what we already know, rather than helping us to understand what we do not.
Once that space is lost, it will not be easily rebuilt. And with it, we lose one of the ways a democratic society listens to itself, renews itself, and imagines what comes next.
Linda Crooks is the chief executive and executive producer of the Traverse Theatre
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