Stands Scotland where it did?

Well, the damn thing's difficult to shift.  Earlier this week, I went to Glasgow's Theatre Royal to see David Greig's Dunsinane. The play saw its first production in 2010, is much-coloured by the Iraq War, and represents a counterfactual take on what happened after the end of Shakespeare's Macbeth.  

The revival stars many of the members of the original cast, including Siobhan Redmond as the surviving Lady Macbeth, and Jonny Phillips as Siward, Earl of Northumberland. Greig brings us a drama of occupation, told primarily from the perspective of Siward's callow English soldiers, trying to keep, and enforce, his kind of a peace in a Scotland rent by civil war. In its essence, it is a tale about the failure of a worthy Englishman to understand the perfidious, thrawn, contrary folk of Scotland and our Esher politics. Greig's Scotland is bleak, poetic -- and above all, cold. 

If you get the chance, the show really is worth seeing, pitching for big national themes. The production is on its way down south, with a tour taking in Birmingham, Bath and my old haunt Oxford, before bending back up to Edinburgh. Glasgow audiences - even for the theatre - are notoriously boisterous. It'd be fascinating to see the production amid a primarily English audience, on an English stage, when Greig's gags are pitched at the Other rather than the Self. 

While the Theatre Royal audience twinkled with self-recognition at the droll Malcolm's cynical take on his countrymen, and at the English infrantrymen's bitching about Scotland, the whole thing takes on a different cast, seen from the other side of Tweed, in a political context where our independence referendum continues to prompt bemusement and perplexity among our southern neighbours. Seems a pity to miss it.

You can read my ★★★ review of the production here.

On Gl★sgow...

One of the great pleasures about being back in Glasgow is how much stuff is on the go. Oxford can be a curious town. So much of the population pass through in transit, tarrying at most for a year or two, the place itself sometimes feels ... hollow, almost.  Not a place in which folk really live, day to day.

This is an exaggeration, of course, and I have friends who still stay there quite contentedly, but I'd struggle ever to envision returning myself on any more permanent basis.  

One frustrating aspect of my time there was the thinness of the local theatre scene. True, Oxford boasts a pretty, expansive Playhouse, but its repertory company long withered away, and it is only now starting to produce its own drama, instead playing host to touring shows from across the country. The National Theatre of Scotland are taking their revival of David Greig's Dunsinane (2010) down there later this month.

This is all well and good, but the lack of localness, and the absence of an abiding relationship between the theatre company and the wider the community, only underlines Oxford's nagging civic gap. 

In fairness, Oxford students are a rapacious dramatic lot. One of the most (unintentionally) funny things I saw was a gaggle of English public schoolboys, trying their gangled pins and reedy voices on West Side Story. The idea of shimmying knife-gangs, and crooning hard-nuts, was already troubling.  Needless to say, for all of their enthusiasm, the stilted, callow academic types didn't quite realise the Sharks or the Jets.

What's more, a few committed independent companies (including my friends and comrades, Troika) bring some splendid productions to life, including the summer staple of open-air Shakespeare, requiring only brass lungs, a voice that carries, and the good luck to situate your run during a blue-skied week.

Now that I'm back in Glasgow, I'll be doing the odd theatre view for the good folk of Exeunt magazine. Last week, I hied me down to the Citizens Theatre to see their new production of Crime and Punishment, on in Glasgow until the 28th, before transferring to Liverpool, and back up to Edinburgh at the end of October. It is a really interesting, theatrical, thought-provoking production, which I'd commend to you all.

If you need further enticing, you can read my whole review here.

Is "the thistle of Scottish political drama" flourishing?

Two shows on the telly, apparently unconnected. The first, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was broadcast on BBC Alba the other night, while two episodes of the second, Borgen, were shown on BBC4. The Cheviot was written by John McGrath and performed across Scotland during the 1970s by the 7:84 theatre company. Unfortunately, the play hasn't been made available on iplayer to view again, for those who missed it. By contrast, Borgen is a Danish political drama from the folk behind The Killing, focussing on the struggles and machinations of Birgitte Nyborg, a political leader in Denmark's proportional electoral system just before and in the aftermath of a general election. 

So what is the connection? I've been thinking lately about Scottish political drama, whether on telly or on stage, and both Borgen and The Cheviot speak to that interest in their distinct ways.  "What is it that makes Scotland a place with such a fertile soil for the thistle of political theatre to flourish?" asks Oran Mor's David MacLellan in a blog for the National Theatre of Scotland. Serendipitously, MacLellan also starred in the 7:84 production of the Cheviot. The piece was written in anticipation of an event held in the parliament in the middle of December past, discussing Scottish theatre and politics. MacLellan's piece is brief, and I didn't attend the subsequent discussion, but is worth briefly examining for the highly characteristic (and in my view, profoundly flawed) account of Scottish social class it promotes. Its general features ought to be familiar to most of you.

MacLellan's takes it for granted that Scotland is a fertile site for political theatre, and offers an account of why he believes it to be so.  His basic thesis appears to be that political theatre would be inhibited by a dominant bourgeoisie, envisaged as individualistic, selfish, thirled to authority and clergy (blame the Episcopalians!). Social class in Scotland, suggests MacLellan, is like a stick of rock. If you chip off the thin, shiny gloss of the middle classes, you discover within a rich, telling seam of working class authenticity. And insofar as there is a discernible bourgeoisie in Scotland, it is self-involved, sparrow-sized, and inauthentic. He writes...

"Class differences between Scotland and England could hardly be more pronounced. Scotland is essentially a working class country where the terms yeoman or gentry have no resonance. Our middle class has historically always been very small and, if it multiplied to some extent during the 19th century, the strangulated vowels of Kelvinside and Morningside are testimony to its collective insecurity. Scratch the average middle class Scot outside Edinburgh’s New Town legal fraternity and you will find within a very few generations a product of the working class. Add to this largely proletarian stew the seasoning of Calvinism, where the individual may converse with God on equal terms without the mediation of Bishop or priest, and you have the beginnings of an audience receptive to ideas, who share a view that there is such a thing as society and who have a personal, ethical and political interest in its outcomes."

I was immediately reminded of Christopher Whyte's notion of the "textual invisibility" of the Scottish middle classes, as enthusiastic producers and consumers of fictions in which they are not represented, their significance denied, minimised, marginalised. We needn't look too far to find recent political examples of this curiosity at work. Quoth Whyte...

"One may posit a demand on the part of the Scottish middle class for fictional representations from which it is itself excluded; a demand, in other words, for textual invisibility. This would connect with the widespread perception of the Scottish middle classes as 'denationalised', as less Scottish in terms of speech and social practice than the lower classes. The task of embodying and transmitting Scottishness is, as it were, devolved to the unemployed, the socially underprivileged, in both actual and representational contexts."

One is immediately struck by how hackneyed and implausible MacLellan's account of the Scottish bourgeoisie is. The "legal fraternity in the New Town"? In terms of members of the Faculty of Advocates, and of the High Courts, we're talking about around 1,000 people at most. Only a handful of those could afford to stay in the stately Georgian homes in the New Town, or derive from families who've been in the law for generations. That's the "unscratchable"  bourgeoisie in a nation of over 5,000,000?  It's an absurdity.  Interestingly, such simple images are, I find, familiar stock-stuff.  In the Ken Stott adaptation of Ian Rankin's The Black Book, Inspector Rebus investigates, amongst others, a patrician Edinburgh MSP Daniel Raeburn.  I haven't read the book, but on the telly, Raeburn is played by David Robb, who specialises bourgeois characters running from the suave to the stern; barristers, army officers - and in his youth, the ill-fated Germanicus in I Claudius (1976). A privileged scion of the New Town, Raeburn cuts a respectable, stuffy figure, boasting an ambitious, cold-eyed and haughty gin-wife, and bears no discernible resemblance to any contemporary Scottish politician I can think of. He is a hackneyed  echo of some pre-1997 Tories perhaps, but difficult to envisage in Holyrood as is.

So what makes something like Borgen possible, but a Scottish equivalent difficult to envisage? Denmark, a country of five million people, with a unicameral national parliament, seating 179 MPs is not obviously more interesting than Scotland.  Perhaps it is a question of Holyrood lacking the political maturity required to envisage counterfactual alternative stories and a perceived lack of drama in the histories which have actually unfolded since 1998, discouraging pieces like the Blair-Brown inspired The Deal (2003) or the New Labour spin-inspired The Thick of It from Armando Ianucci. Put it another way. What sort of character could a dramatic, fictional First Minister be? What sources of narrative, of tension, corruption and struggle might one identify in the Scottish political landscape?

Could it be that one of our problems - encouraged by the theory being propounded by MacLellan and those who share his opinion - is that we don't talk about Scottish elites these days, their incestuous connections, throttled by the suffocating assumption that everyone is basically decent and well-intentioned? How can one develop a political theatre, when we're all pretending to be Jock Tamson's bairns, and our humanitarian banalities serve mostly to obscure from us the extent to which our egalitarianism is a fond, self-serving fantasy? How can one critically engage through drama with questions of who holds power in Scotland, if the producers of the dramatic refuse to see Scotland's bourgeoisie as anything but proletarians in none-too-convincing costumes, a small cast of peripheral characters with background parts, non-speaking roles and little influence? To put the argument at its most provocative, surely, contra MacLellan, the really interesting question is why contemporary Scotland doesn't have political drama (in both the institutional and, arguably the broader senses), and what we might do about it? 

La Corbie, the Scottish Makar...

I've come to the conclusion that my poetry education in secondary school was hopelessly, even absurdly, old fashioned. Hardly touching the modern masters of  form and verse and sentiment, there was nary a Scottish iambic foot to be seen in our jotters and text, save for the odd scrap of MacCaig and the occasional, seasonal resort to a bit of Burns. Our staples were bundles of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. As a result, I find myself singularly ill-equipped to respond in a reflective way to the news that Liz Lochhead is to replace Edwin Morgan as the Scots national "Makar".

By contrast, I'm much more familiar with her playwriting. While exceedingly keen on Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), recently reinvigorated and re-staged by the National Theatre of Scotland, I'm more ambivalent about Lochhead's whole canon and trademark burlesque Scottifications of the work of Molière. However, it seems appropriate to honour the moment of her appointment with a piece of her writing. Over at Scots Whay Hae, Alistair Braidwood has written a piece including two of his favourite Lochhead poems "Sorting through" and "Opening with the closing". He writes:

"There may be other poets who you prefer. I tend to read Don Patterson more than I do Liz Lochhead these days, but this appointment is not about who is someone's favourite, it's about who is best placed to represent Scotland in poetry and, through that poetry, to promote Scotland to others and to itself. It is this that makes Liz the perfect choice. I raise a glass to her and hope you'll do the same."

For my own part, I wanted to quote more extensively from La Corbie's wonderfully lively prologue from Mary Queen of Scots, but my copy seems to have gone a-wandering and because it is a (relatively) recent work, it isn't available in full online. At any rate, here's the opening cark-caw of Lochhead's inspired, ragbag half-crow narrator...

La Corbie:

Country: Scotland. Whit like is it?

It’s a peatbog, it’s a daurk forest.

It’s a cauldron o’ lye, a saltpan or a coal mine.

If you’re gey lucky it’s a bricht bere meadow or a park o’ kye.

Or mibbe... it’s a field o’ stanes.

It’s a tenement or a merchant’s ha’.

It’s a hure hoose or a humble cot. Princes Street or Paddy’s Merkit.

It’s a fistfu’ o’ fish or a pickle o’ oatmeal.

It’s a queen’s banquet o’ roast meats and junketts.

It depends. It depends ... Ah dinna ken whit like your Scotland is.

Here ’smines.

National flower: the thistle.

National pastime: nostalgia.

National weather: smirr, haar, drizzle, snow.

National bird: the crow, the corbie, le corbeau, moi!

How me? Eh? Eh? Eh? Voice like a choked laugh.

Ragbag o’a burd in ma black duds, a’ angles and elbows and broken oxter feathers, black beady een in ma executioner’s hood.

No braw, but Ah think Ah ha’e a sort of black glamour.

Dramatic Darien Scheme scheme...

I've previously discussed the unaccountable Teutonic fixation which dominated my historical education in secondary school and the almost total dearth of Scottish material on the curriculum. My attempts at autodidacticism despite, I remain embarrassingly ignorant of great swathes of Scotland's history. Concerningly, I'm sure that my illiteracy is quite well companioned, even general, amongst my fellow Scots.

As some of you may well have deduced from my occasional reference, I'm also very fond of the theatre, though life's hurly-burly and my own want of foresight prevents me from going as often as I'd like. When not dashing off jeremiads here or putting more professional pen to paper and thumb to key, attempting to write plays is a bit of a cathartic hobby of mine. At the moment, I'm warming most  of all to a historical theatre. As my profile picture might suggest, I find poncy cauliflower wigs and fancy frock coats irresistibly appealing. At least insofar as the dramas they attach to aren't prissy Austenesque affairs.  Being furth of Scotland will prevent me from attending a show which happily marries all of these themes.  By way of compensation, I thought I'd highlight it here. In Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Liz Lochhead demonstrated how vital and expressive inventively staged histories can prove.

Hopefully, the National Theatre of Scotland will soon furnish us with a  more contemporary example of how it is done. As part of the Edinburgh International Festival, the National Theatre of Scotland will be performing Alistair Beaton's new play Caledonia. At the spine of Beaton's drama is the infamous (or perhaps more accurately unfamous, if my best guesses about Scots historical education are correct) Darien Scheme of the late 17th Century. In Beaton's words:

"The play is an exploration of Scotland's futile attempt at establishing a colony in Panama which saw ships set sail from Leith in 1698.  The mission ended in failure, bankrupted Scotland and led to the Act of Union."

The playwright also wrote this commentary piece for the Herald today, no doubt anticipating the play's substantive themes. The National Theatre of Scotland style the piece thus:

"Inspired by documents, journals, letters, songs and poems of the period, celebrated playwright and satirist Alistair Beaton has created a work that is both a tribute to heroic ambition and a darkly witty take on the deceptions and self-deceptions of rich and poor alike ...Caledonia is a story of greed, euphoria and mass delusion. It is the story of a small, poor country mistaking itself for a big, rich country. It is an ancient story for modern times."

I'm no grumpy bugbear by any means, demanding the Scottification of all of the National Theatre's material, but I very much welcome this example of newly commissioned work, making a foray into an avowedly Scottish subject. I wish it well and hope it comes up to snuff. While the historical interest of the Darien Scheme and its failure is undeniable, it will be no easy thing to turn that interest into an engaging piece of theatre. The show will have a limited run, performing at Eden Court in Inverness from 13/08/2010 - 16/08/2010 before trundling south to Edinburgh's King's Theatre, running from 21/08/2010 - 26/08/2010. As I noted, I won't be able to see the show myself, but if I've piqued your interest and the venues are convenient, do pop along.  Oh, and remember to let me know what you make of it!

Are you a Scots Shakespeare hidden in the wings?

Just in case anyone among my readership are bashful but budding writers, I wanted to draw your collective attention to the Open.Stage Playwriting Competition being run by Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.

Open to all folk living in Scotland or of Scots stock loitering in the rest of the British Isles over the age of 18, the competition invites a synopsis of the proposed theatrical yarn and 20-odd pages of your writing to give the judges a sense of your capacity to realise the proposed material. After the closing date at 5pm on Friday 18^th of December, the three submissions determined to be the nattiest by a panel of Scottish theatre’s high heid yins will go forward as finalists. The three playwrights will be given £2,000 and mentored as they coax the little shoots of their plays into full flower. Bringing the competition into the digital age – and encouraging public participation – the three finalists will then have to film a trailer of their would-be bit of art, which the common footsoldiers of the stalls will vote on, with an eye to its theatrical interest to them. The winner of this vote will then be professionally staged by the Tron Theatre Company as the flagship production of their Autumn 2010 season. The disappointed pair will also get a rehearsed read-through of their material at the Tron – and I imagine, if they’re worth the effort, the plays will have a good chance of catching the eye of one of big fishes that slap about in Scotland’s small arty pond. The small print also reveals that the winner will receive the not-unreasonable sum of £6,560 for his or her labours.

Sitting in judgement over the synopses are Andy Arnold, Artistic Director of the Tron, Jay Smith, well-known actor Peter Mullan, Vicky Featherstone who is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the National Theatre of Scotland, Janice Forsyth from off the tranny, Davids Greig & Harrower, successful playwrights, Keith Bruce arts hack for the Herald and Julie Ellen of the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, based in the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. It is a competition of amazing potential and significant possibility. Any among you with a dramatic and literary bent who get an itch and consider giving it a go – I’d strongly encourage you to enter. As a lethargic, slothsome sort of person myself, it is all too easy to see these little possibilities pass one by, without even dignifying them with a stab. The excuses are pretty thin since for this competition, you don’t have to mint a perfectly pitched 90 minute performance – only a inspirational précis and a series of brisk vignettes.

For any whose interest is piqued, all the relevant information can be found on the Tron website here.

Scotland's secret quantitative life...

I’m a great fan of quantitative social research. While much of the texture of people’s lives are lost by its persistent reduction of lived experience to a webway of percentages, percentiles, means and medians, groups above or below average, the quantitative view invariably tells us something we did not know, or only dimly appreciated. I’ve found that life exercises strong temptations to regard the self and your ordinary life, universalised, as the ordinary condition of most men and women. While sometimes, images and information succeed in temporarily rebuking this jealous sense of one’s own ordinariness, it tends to return, the lives lead by our fellow citizens collapsing once again into our own experience, its tenor informed by the settings in which we loiter and the people we meet.

Big, hefty quantitative research is uniquely empowered to give those comfortable assumptions a shoogle. Even if the aggregation of conceptual categories can be problematic, and leave us empty-handed in terms of the whys and wherefores which brings that state of affairs about, the social frame is sketched in in our minds. We know ourselves better. That at least is my polemic on the goodness of quantitative research, and the interest in the Scottish Household Survey 2007-08, published this week. Obscured by the froth and vinegar attending Megrahi’s release, the survey contains various interesting little sparkling motes of illumination into Scottish life, and per the report’s mandatory corny ante-title, Scotland’s People. Here are just a few of the statistics which caught my eye. For those of you who enjoy a good going bout of social research in your spare time, you can read the whole publication here.

On t’internet…

One for the bloggers, this. We pioneers of citizen journalism and happily, among the digitally included. On the question of use, asked flatly, 68% of men use the internet, whether on a personal computer or at work, while 30% don’t. Amongst the ladies, 61% make use of it on the same terms, with a 7% hike in female internet non-use, up at 37%. On the phenomenon of the “silver surfer” in Scotland, the figures show that 93% of women over 75 don’t use the internet – while 17% of apparently more tec-savvy chaps over 75 “surf”. 44% of men aged 60 – 74 use the t’internet, while only 33% of women the same age. For both men and women under 44, internet use is in the 80% + region. Deprivation emerges as an exclude force here. Among the 15% classified as most deprived, 50% use the net personally or for work, some 14% lower than the average across Scotia. On the home access question, 64% had access in the last quarter of 2008, compared to only 40% in the first quarter of 2003. Deprivation reappears here also. While the Scotland averages are around 60% have home access, 40% don’t – these figures invert among the most deprived, with 59% not able to access the internet at home.

On being cultural…

I’ve mentioned this before, in the context of unpopular operatics and balletics. The lassies are more cultural than the chaps, once again, with 77% of women getting up to something cultural, to only 67% of men. On the figure of reading, which I mentioned before, men continuing to be dismal, with only 57% of respondents reading for pleasure, opposed to 70% of women. This is a decrease on all counts on the previous figures. Marginally cheering news for Scottish Opera, with a swelling 1% increase on last figures, to 6& of the population taking an interest in howling Brunhildas and yammering hairdressers. Scottish Ballet, however, languishes stead on its 5%. The National Theatre of Scotland may be more cheerful, with 28% of the population up for plays and drama, including panto. A quarter of the population, however, enjoys “none of the above” even once across the year, including museums, galleries, the cinema, libraries, live music – or all the rest. A pretty grim life, that.

On housing tenure…

On housing tenure in 2008, 66% of householders were “owner occupied”, with 23% in social rented housing, 9% in private rented housing and 2% making some other arrangement. Contrast this with the figures from 1999, where the percentages were 61, 32, 5 and 2 percent respectively. Contrast this with the reported owner occupation rate in 1961, which was only 25% of the total. When mapped against the Survey’s cohort identified as the “15% most deprived”, the rate of home ownership within this category is 34%, with a much higher use of socially rented housing, at 57%. Interestingly, with this 15% excised from the whole, and the “rest of Scotland” is examined along the same lines, owner occupation runs at 72%, use of social rented housing 17%.

On banking…

Particularly interesting, this. Asked, do you have a bank or building society account? 91% said yes, while 5% confirmed they did not, another 5% not owing up, one way or the other. Contrast this with 1999, when 86% of respondents confirmed accounts, while a significantly larger number – 12% - had no account in the household. Like much of the survey, deprivation seems to be a key variable. “4% of households in the 15% most deprived areas did not have an account of any kind compared with only 1% in the rest of Scotland” (2009, 77).

Savings or investments…

The survey also enquired about whether households had either of the above between 1999 and 2008. Rates vary a bit – and toughminded souls telling the researcher to stuff their question increase from 6% in 1999 to 9% in 2008 – but in the period a maximum of 54% of householders have any savings or investments between ’99 and ’08, while households admitting having no savings varies from a low of 37% in 2002/03 to a high of 42% in 2008.

Purchasing goods on credit…

52% of households have and have used a credit card from one of their collective wallets, while 34% use no kind of credit in 2008 – be it mail order schemes, charge cards, hire purchase or what have you. Peering into how credit relates to types of household – be they single adult, small adult, single parents, single pensioners or what have you – the single pensioner is the least likely to have a credit card (31%), and the most likely to make use of none of these streams of debt (54%), followed by single parents (46%).

On highest qualification…

24% of respondents in ‘07/08 had a degree or professional qualification. Splendidly, at this level, there is a basic gender parity with 25% of male and 24% of female respondents. Roughly the same % of the total, 23% have no qualifications – including O grades, Highers and equivalents. Given prevailing educational policies, the weighting of this towards the older cohorts is perhaps unsurprising, with 42% of 60 – 74 year olds and 56 % of those older than 75 have no qualifications.

On driving licenses…

Think everyone can drive? (I certainly can’t. Hate the hideous metal things.) Am I a lonely, incompetent, faintly emasculated soul? Apparently not! Only 67% of adults hold full diving licenses, of which 76% are men and 60% women. Among the young – those 16 – 24, 45% of chaps can legally tot their vehicle, 40% of chapesses can. That means that being driving-license bearing youth pitches you into the minority. Yeehaw.

On puffing fags…

Recorded averages put smoking rates at around 26% of men and 25% of women questioned. Among the “youff”, the percentages are higher, with 30% of male 16 – 24 year olds are smoke cracked, to 28% of nicotine-soused young women. Apparently, 58% of those classified as “unemployed and seeking work smoke”, while a massive 64% of those unable to work due to short term ill-health do so. Devil making smoky work for idle hands, there, I imagine.

On being Green…

No, the question is not whether you are yet another bald man, standing for public office representing the Scottish Green Party. Rather, and arguably, much more simply – the question – do you recycle? If so, what? Its pretty de minimus stuff – namely, did you recycle anything in the past month. But still, interesting to see changes in patterns. In 2008, 83% of households recycled some newspapery artefacts, an increase from a mere 45% in 2003. Given our boozy nation undoubtedly generates a good deal of glass bottles, a pleasing 70% of households chucked one of their old Merlot bottles into the recycling tubs, another increase on the 2003 figure of 35%. Interesting variations in whether folk recycle by what kind of house they live in, be it bungalow or flat.

That’s my selection. Plenty of other material in the Report's 200-odd pages to titillate and delight the quantitatively sensitive that I've left out. Equally, there are political implications associated with the data and in particular, the continuing exclusions associated with deprivation in Scotland. The detail serves to remind us of the consequences of deprivation in small places, and how far it acts to constrict access to public goods and society's cultural capital.

Ethnicity, Racism, Culture: A mild mannered meander...

I’m a secret and highly selective statistics enthusiast. The insight into the wider society – the surprise that lies concealed and undetectable beneath our everyday experiences – irritation about the categories the researchers have gathered information around - and, as a sparkling chaser, endless potential disputation about the causal force driving the numbers reported in the raw data.

"Ethnicity" data drives me up the wall, largely because of the persistent and irrational intrusion of race thinking in its terms. Since when was “white” an ethnic group, if ethnicity as a notion is based on culture, background, education? Gathering information of this type is sometimes discreetly described as identifying “visible minorities”. From the point of view of studying the causes of racism, and analysing the effect of skin pigmentation as a trigger for racist thinking – this may be useful. Even if I’m not a racist, others may be. This sensitivity moves one from philosophy into sociology, and the question of how particular ideas start to drive the social life this way and that. Such diverting issues are not, I fear, at the core of census takers and governmental information gatherers decision to include this racist “white/black” ethnicity pairing into their pre-selected categories. The “mixed” alternative, is even more depressingly resonant. Indeed, our attempts to emancipate ourselves from the old(ish), villainous idea of race are not assisted by the degree to which our debates are conducted under the long American penumbra, and its idiot and conclusionless discourse about Barack Obama's "race". That, and enactments whose nomenclature – Race Relations Act 1976 – support a dialogue and a vocabulary which supposes the world may cogently be divided along racial lines.

I could go on – particularly about the binary gender categories these researchers frequently employ – but I shan’t. What I wanted to talk about was culture, culture strategy and devolution. Which brings us back to the statistics. Some of you may be familiar with the Scottish Household Survey. Most of you probably haven’t looked at it. As with all quantitative explorations in public opinions, how generalisable the indicated conclusions are may be debated, and are naturally the subject of considerable social scientific exploration and critique. Today I’m particularly interested in the People and Culture in Scotland section of the survey, and what it reveals about the habits, predilections and cultural choices made by the (hopefully) representative sample of people living in Scotland.

There are many curious little corners. 69% of all of the people asked read and/or buy books. Breaking it down into male and female, however, revealed that this 69% was constituted by only 62% of men reading, to 74% of women. Peering further into this 69% by age reveals a fairly stable level of reading for pleasure across all of the cohorts, with 69% of 16 – 24 year old doing so, a fall to 67% of 25 – 34 year olds, 70% from 30 – 74 year olds – before dropping away to 61 % among the over 75s. Perhaps predictably, when mapped onto the Scottish index of multiple deprivation quintiles – 1 being most deprived to 5, least deprived – there is a significant divergence. While 56% of those people coded as most deprived read – 79% of those least deprived do so. A deviation of 23%.

Education undoubtedly plays a part in this. When reading is divided by “highest qualification”, there is a even more marked deviation. If one has a degree, 83% of people are apt to read. Interestingly, that figure doesn’t sink much when the highest qualification is a “higher, A level or equivalent”, with 83% of respondents with such qualifications reading. By contrast, those with no qualifications reported that only 48% of them picked up a novel and gave it a thumbing through.

Of course, the survey doesn’t take into account what folk are reading. It also excludes those under the age of 16, and so can’t tell us how enthusiastic the younger weans are about squinting through their books. The qualitative issue aside, the evidence would suggest that any complaint from the older sections of society that the “young can’t even pick up a book” is false. Other interesting nuggets from the document include that 37% reported visiting a museum or gallery in Scotland over the last 12 months. That 6% of the population amuses itself by writing - and that even if they don't care for reading other people's prose - men are more disposed to scribble than women, 8% to 6%.

With respect to attending cultural events, the report found that 75% of those questioned had attended visual art, film, music, theatre or so on during the last 12 months. Leaving 25% who did bugger all. Going to the cinema proved the most popular with 55% of folk going at least once annually on average. When related to the indicators of deprivation, the least deprived went to the cinema 13% over the average, while the most deprived were 15% below average, with 40% going. This is just one local expression of a sharp theme. Across the study, and attendance at all cultural events, while 60% of those from the most deprived areas had attended anything cultural across the year, among the least deprived this figure is 89%, a radically wide difference of 29%.

Was it what you expected? And why is this true anyway? Although for some people, it is simply a matter of poverty and an inability to meet the costs of access to cultural goods – attitudinal barriers play a part, as do senses of entitlement to public spaces and particular services. It also may raise some questions. For example, only 5% of the population examined indicated that they went to the opera. Similarly, ballet attracted only 5% as well. It is obviously impossible to tell whether these populations overlap, although one might have one’s suspicions. Either way, one cannot confidently say that in total 10% of the Scottish total population like their Nutcrackers and their Aidas.

The merest of explorations, however, reveals the public money which is channelled into the National Companies­ – the new National Theatre of Scotland, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Ballet and Scottish Opera. The last two were funded directly by the Scottish Government to the tune of £3,598,022 and £7,896,293 in 2006/2007 respectively, a handsome total of £11,494,315. The figures increased to £4,620,868 and £8,459,091 for 2008/2009 – totalling £13,079,959 – and the indicated but no doubt imperilled plans for 2009/10 and 2010/2011 continue to increase. I’m not making an argument, nor are my greedy paws lingering near the plug, with a manic grin towards the operatically enthusiastic. In point of fact, while I very much enjoy the theatre and try to go regularly, I never tread near ballet or opera. However, I am self-conscious enough to recognise that those preferences are precisely mine and bind others not a jot. I think that the creation of the National Theatre of Scotland was a splendid idea, credit to the previous Labour-Liberal executive for taking it forward. I do, however, find it curious that while the Survey indicates 19% of the population can be coaxed into attending drama – or 35% who attend any theatrical performance including panto and musicals - that the Theatre’s budget is just over half that of the Opera, which respectively seems to interest at most 5% of the public. Or to formulate it another way, a mere quarter of those who may be interested in the National Theatre’s performances.

Of course, to comprehend the wider funding picture, one would have to take into account the funds disbursed by the Scottish Arts Council – or Creative Scotland in the future. Nevertheless, it does raise interesting questions about what should be the basis for funding awards, and what the policy ends? Should popular things be paid for out of public coffers, or should various high-end performances be propped up despite ostensible lack of public enthusiasm based on abstract artistic goods and a broader, “high culture” goal? Alternatively, as opposed to binary questions about money or no money how would we want the allocation to be weighted, and what factors should determine our choices? Should it matter than only a tiny sliver of the Scottish population bothers its posterior with operatic howling or graceful pirouettes?

This takes us back to the much broader question of arts, government, cash and society which we rarely trouble ourselves to consider, while the funding streams quietly and consistently drift by. An important issue for devolution - and given the late debates on Creative Scotland, and a Culture Minister who is less than enthusiastic about the cause he is espousing - these considerations are live. Given imminent spending constraints, it is natural that the choices about how much public money to spend on the arts becomes more focussed than in phases of easy economic vigour. One can expect political eyes fixed on the opportunity cost and clichéd comparisons of hearty bread and butter spending - and showy artistic expense. Such brute crudities are disposed to underestimate the value of the arts, and of investing in cultural capital, but such calculations are unavoidable.

What do you think?