Investment in Scottish arts is essential

What a strange world we live in when the severance package for one BP boss man (your report, 26 July) could well be enough to fund all Scottish arts practitioners and their activities for the next year.

And it's only the latest in a succession of such pay-outs. Meantime, the professional arts community, the greater proportion of whom barely make a living as it is, are being warned to expect savage cuts to the support they receive.

Only once did I demur when reading Joyce McMillan's excellent article (24 July), when she allowed that insidious word "subsidy", rather than "investment", to sneak in.

The reality is that we, the arts practitioners, must frequently subsidise our efforts with income derived from other sources.

Given that we already live on the margins, it seems an utter madness to attenuate even further such investment as the arts receive, particularly when wider society is going to need as much cultural nourishment as possible.

It should hardly be necessary to say that engagement with the arts can have a transformative effect on those who experience it, given the evidence, from Barlinnie's Special Unit through Sistema projects in the slums of Caracas, and now Raploch, to innumerable residencies in schools, hospitals and elsewhere.

The sense that "my vision/my voice/my story" has value can effect positive change to the outlook of individuals and communities.

That sense of worth, which plenty of artists are happy to share, is going to be much needed, if economic forecasts are anything like accurate.

Equally, the economic benefits to be gained from healthier, better behaved citizens should be obvious.

But we also need the arts to thrive as something beneficial to society as a whole.

Much of that success, particularly in theatre, is achieved on the thinnest of shoestrings.

Companies perform miracles on inadequate budgets, paying bare minimum wages, and no kind of long-term security, unless they commit to "business plans" and/or employ "consultants" to advise on management and marketing. Yet they deliver shows that pack houses, and balance their books, because such things matter to them.

Politicians have to be reminded that the arts are no luxury, but a very real essential.

AONGHAS MacNEACAIL

Carlops

Peeblesshire