Chamber and committees

I want to come back to the previous question, but I will ask it in a different way. Yesterday’s autumn statement is now being read, and one of the implications is a further crunch on public services, especially in 2027-28. Given the pressures that are being talked about, how rigorously are we examining other options?

I understand Ailsa Macfarlane’s point that, if you open an attraction, there can be long-term costs, and it might not attract the numbers that you want. However, just around the corner from Alexander Graham Bell’s birthplace, there is the Johnnie Walker visitor centre, which has just been established and is going great guns. It has taken over the entire House of Fraser building. It shows that that sort of thing is possible. Are we properly exploiting—if that is the right word—some of the assets that we have?

I have two quick examples that perhaps relate to what our papers call “intangible cultural heritage”. First, the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum discovered that it had the world’s oldest football. Instead of keeping it on a dusty shelf, the people there brought it out; when they did so, there were international satellite news feeds from around the world at the Smith, and the football then went to Hamburg for the world cup—even though Scotland was not at it—and appeared at the start of the competition. It had a huge influence.

Secondly, we took William Wallace’s sword over to New York and had a huge response to that. The Wallace monument visitor figures went through the roof.

Are we rigorously examining other opportunities? The question might relate to museums in particular, although I would point out that, when we had an evidence session with library representatives, I mentioned the fact that the central library in Edinburgh sits next to where witches were executed as well as to Greyfriars Bobby and suggested that the library could try to exploit that. Given the pressure on public services, are we sufficiently and rigorously looking at alternatives to generate funds that will allow us to do the other things that we want to do? My fear is that public resources will just not be there to the same extent in future.

Maybe Lucy Casot could go first.

I suppose that there is a distinction to be drawn with regard to the Government’s obligation to look across the whole scope of things, but if the Government and the committee can agree a position where what we receive has more relevance and less volume, that will be good.

In response to Mark Ruskell, you mentioned talking to the EU ourselves. Obviously, the EU is the source of much of the legislation, but you might be aware that this Parliament and this committee have the ability to nominate to CALRE—the Conference of Regional Legislative Assemblies—which I have been nominated to, or the proximity group or whatever it is called to the Committee of the Regions. However, we will not have a member on that for many months to come, which I think undermines the ability of this committee and this Parliament to have those direct conversations. I do not know whether it is proper to do this—I know that the committee clerks are working on it—but could the Government prevail upon the UK Government to speed the process up as quickly as possible?

I listened to the exchange between you and Kate Forbes, in which there was mention of common sense. I wonder whether that makes you the Scottish Government’s minister for common sense. It seems to be the fashion, these days, to appoint such ministers.

I have two points. First, you mentioned accession. Accession is often portrayed as solidifying alignment. However, it also solidifies divergence, as happened with Maastricht—for example, with Danish second homes or the UK opt-out from the social chapter. If the EU proceeded with gene editing, I would be happy to see an opt-out on that. I just make that point because we sometimes get the wrong impression of what alignment actually means.

Given what you said about the volume of work in the UK Parliament and the resources devoted to scrutiny—including four legal advisers—and what I think is a fairly common academic assumption that there is a real lack of genuine scrutiny of European legislation beyond, perhaps, the House of Lords, are we not setting ourselves up to try to do far too much? You mentioned looking across the whole scope of things. I am fairly new to the committee, and maybe this has already been done, but might it be better for the Government and the committee to agree what was relevant and thereby make activity much more focused, as long as the committee or individual members could ask for information about areas that were not covered? Would it not be better to be more proportionate and focus on the areas that are more likely to be of interest to both Scotland and the committee? That would make it easier on officials, given the breadth of the stuff that they could be doing.

Thinking back to the Brexit debate, two scenarios were set out: one was that we would reach sunny uplands, full of opportunity, with no or very little regulation. On the other side, it was said that Brexit would be an enormous act of self-harm. I am getting a distinct impression from the sector about which of those two scenarios you feel is being played out. Perhaps this sector, more than any other, shows the folly of cutting ourselves off from a huge market right on our doorstep. It is depressing to hear some of the stories about people who have stopped working in their profession or stopped performing or touring.

I have two quick questions. The first is the extent to which the things that we have been discussing were predicted or predictable. Was it possible to know that those things were going to happen, or have some of them become apparent subsequently? What proportion of things does that apply to—if you can make a guesstimate of that? That question is for any member of the panel.

My second question is specifically for Lisa Whytock. I was quite surprised at this, but I am new to the committee, so this might be something that everyone else knows. You said that Scotland was too small a country to sustain full-time musicians. If that is the case, is there a cut-off in country sizes for the ability to sustain full-time musicians? Do you have an idea of what size of country would be able to do that?

I invite any member of the panel to comment on the things that have had a big effect that have become apparent since Brexit that were perhaps not predicted or predictable beforehand.

It is very interesting to hear your comments. I spent a year in Canada at the University of Prince Edward Island and I worked for quite a time on the Committee of the Regions, which is mentioned in our papers.

I am particularly interested in Professor Cornago’s comments about progress and regress in relation to how this thing works. We have a quote from President Biden, which says that the foreign policy of Canada in peacetime is to be at war with Quebec. It feels a bit like that in the UK just now, in my view. We have an increasingly insecure and paranoid UK Government that is now saying that, when a Scottish minister tries to be active internationally, they first have to speak to the UK ambassador or ambassadorial staff. Also, like other parts of the UK, Scotland was completely cut out of the discussions on Brexit and the trade discussions afterwards. It feels a bit like a curtain is coming down.

Professor Cornago, I think that you said that the progress and regress often depends on the political imperatives. For example, if the Basque representatives could provide the balance in the Spanish Parliament, that would empower them. I wonder whether, in either of your experiences, there is any pragmatic way to get a basis on which the Governments might be better able to work together, other than a sort of political force majeure.

On trade and industry, our position is pretty much the same as Quebec’s. We have Scottish Development International, which is the most successful body of its type in any part of the UK, apart from the south-east of England, at getting foreign direct investment. Generally, however, outwith trade and investment, how best could the two interests—the UK Government and the Scottish Government, in what is obviously a very centralised unitary state, unlike the confederation that you have in Canada—rub along to get to a more productive relationship, outwith the political ins and outs of representation in the UK Parliament, if that makes sense?

Thank you for your answers. Unlike in the Canadian example that was given, there are cases where the UK Government is obliged to consult the Scottish Parliament, but it has become increasingly normalised for it to ignore what is said. It is able to do that. In fact, the UK Government describes it as a self-denying ordinance as to whether it will take any notice of what is said.

To what extent do the international activities of Quebec reflect and build on any discretion that it has on immigration? I understand that you have a slightly decentralised immigration system. In Scotland we are suffering depopulation, so the extent to which we should have freedom of action on immigration is a matter of interest. We used to have that under something called the fresh talent initiative. To what extent does Quebec make use of such discretion?

As well as being as vigilant as ever for any rising incidence of antisemitism or anti-Islamic sentiment, we should acknowledge the fact that, by and large, people in Scotland have not gone down that route. We should be quick to condemn, but we should also praise.

Even from a distance, though, to see the Hamas attack in which more than 1,000 people were killed in the first week of October, and then to see that more than 8,000 people in Gaza were killed, was horrifying. I recall, in particular, the incident about which it was reported that although one Hamas commander was killed so were 400 ordinary people and many others, including children, are still lying under rubble. My concern now is Hezbollah’s threat to start attacking tomorrow if there is not a ceasefire—I think that it tried to lay down those terms overnight. I do not know the extent to which the Scottish Government will have any information or a view on that. With the largest American naval fleet since the second world war being stationed in the middle east, the real worry is that situation will become a genuinely geopolitical conflagration that goes off in different directions. Does the Scottish Government have any line of sight on the thinking around that or what is being done to prevent it from happening?

I have one final question. If we accept, as some of us do, that we have had 13 years of austerity and reducing budgets and that a largely fixed budget is apportioned to the Scottish Government depending on what happens elsewhere in the United Kingdom, we can see that those 13 years are really starting to have an effect. As I mentioned earlier, one thing that we heard from the organisations last week was that the increasing costs are sitting alongside relatively standstill budgets.

In addition to the assurance that you have given that nobody will receive a cut—it is really important to get that message out—will you continue to keep your eyes open and to focus your efforts on anything further that can be done to help individual actors in the sector to deal with the extraordinary pressures that they currently face, not least in relation to energy costs, although we have also been hearing about talent loss, with talent going to London especially?

It will require only a yes or no answer, if the cabinet secretary can do that.

Of the members of the committee, I think that I and the convener have been here longest. In the 16 years that I have been here, I have never heard a proposal from an Opposition party to increase the culture budget.

As we are duty bound to look at other ways in which we could increase the budget, I asked the witnesses last week whether they could provide any evidence of that from comparative devolved areas. However, the examples that they provided—from Canada, Korea, Quebec and Catalonia—are not really comparable. If the Government has any information from other devolved areas, as akin to Scotland as possible, and how they do this, it would therefore be useful if it could provide that to the committee.