Joyce McMillan: Arts budget hardly deserves to 'share the pain' of country's cuts

The form is fairly predictable. Between courses, everyone around the table is asked to say a few words; and the event rapidly drifts towards that familiar form of Scottish boss-class discourse which frames Scotland itself as a problem, and a sadly inadequate place when compared with - say - the south of England, or the west coast of the United States.

So when it comes to my turn, it's always a pleasure to point out that as a theatre critic, I am lucky enough to inhabit a world where being in Scotland is not a problem, but a privilege and a joy. Thanks to generations of inspired artists, and half a century of consistently decent investment from both public and commercial sponsors, Scotland's cultural scene is now an object of admiration across the world; and a constant stream of visitors arrives to study our success in spawning world-class writers, musicians and visual artists, in creating a new National Theatre on a famously innovative model, or in maintaining and developing the Edinburgh Festival as the biggest and most exuberant in the western world.

For a modest public investment of about 100 million a year from central government, and perhaps twice that from our local authorities, the cultural sector in Scotland routinely delivers levels of prestige, publicity, and image-changing power that no global advertising campaign could begin to equal. Given the labour-intensive nature of the industry - and the generally modest level of pay, in a greed-free sector where even the leaders of top organisations are rarely paid more than 45,000 a year - arts spending also generates large numbers of jobs and retains tens of thousands of energetic and creative people in Scotland, despite the huge competing attraction of London as an arts and media centre.

The positive role of the arts in areas of public policy from mental health to urban regeneration is well documented, and can be utterly transforming.

And if we add to all these tangible benefits the more subtle power of the arts to transform Scotland's view of itself - to reframe the nation not as a problematic provincial backwater, but as a powerhouse of 21st century creativity, generating work that is recognised on a global level for its ability to articulate the current human condition - then we have an investment that must be classed as the best, the brightest, and the most brilliantly cost-effective any small-nation government could make; a conclusion already reached, it's worth noting, by similar-scale governments from Ireland to Quebec and Catalonia.

So it's particularly dispiriting, this week, to come across two hints that this key area of success in recent Scottish life is coming under threat. One is the report that in order to save a paltry 2.3 million pounds - hardly enough to make a pinprick in the huge Scottish budgets for health, education, or social service - the Scottish Government is thinking of slicing a cool 10 per cent off the budgets of all our national performing companies. The rationale behind this is that "the arts must take their share of the pain"; but that, to put it bluntly, is nonsense. The money spent on the arts is less than 1 per cent of public expenditure in Scotland; arguably, given the amount of poverty pay in the sector, it should have been doubled years ago. The money shaved from it will inflict huge damage on Scotland's cultural life and prestige, without making any significant difference elsewhere; it is a classic example of a foolish cut, a gesture that does incalculable harm for no benefit.

And the other gloomy signal comes from the new arts and film body Creative Scotland, which - after a long decade in the making - finally held its launch event at the Roxy in Edinburgh this week. The new director and chair, Andrew Dixon and Sandy Crombie, spoke well enough about the need to accentuate the positive in Scotland's cultural life; and they seem more than aware of all the key issues they face.

The organisation is being launched, though, in a climate of cuts which, like the threat to the funding of the national companies, is damaging far beyond what can be justified by the amounts of money involved, and which is already forcing Andrew Dixon to spout worrying management-speak about how giving out money is the "boring" part of his job, as compared to "making new partnerships", or acting as an advocate for the arts.

Of course, advocacy and partnership are important; and no-one knows more than the average arts organisation about the need to search constantly and exhaustingly for new partners and sponsors, however meagre the sums involved. In the end, though, we either want to provide public support for the arts, or we don't.

And if we do, then it's high time to stop apologising and euphemising around the idea of public subsidy like a bunch of ageing Thatcherites, and to engage instead with the much more interesting question of how it can be done well, under today's conditions.

Simplification of process, reduction of bureaucratic box-ticking, and faster and better-informed artistic decision-making, combined with a continuous, living debate about the criteria on which those decisions are made; these should be the defining characteristics of a new arts funding agency for our time. And there's no doubt that Creative Scotland could become that ground-breaking agency, on two conditions. First, that it stops apologising for the financial support to artists that should be its proud core activity, and concentrates on dishing out that support with judgment and style. And secondly, that the Scottish Government, from somewhere in its soul, summons up the wisdom to ignore those siren calls for equality of misery; and to give this brand-new agency, in one of the most vibrant areas of Scottish life, the money to get on with the job.

Evidence shows no linkage between decentralisation of tax powers and growth Calman Independent Expert Group, Page 31..