(personal underlines)
How Creative Scotland was corrupted by gender ideology
Loath as I am to indulge in the national pastime of Scottish exceptionalism, we do pretty well when it comes to producing writers. From the mainstream to the fringes, and across the world, many key literary figures were born, or are based, north of the border.
There are the commercial giants. JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter and (as Robert Galbraith) Cormoran Strike books show her dizzying talent for making the epic deeply personal. Ian Rankin, whose knotty Rebus novels are more a chronicle of the difficulties of living as a moral man in an immoral world than they are whodunnits. And there’s Val McDermid, whose crime writing goes to the darkest corners of the psyche.
Then there are the poets like Jackie Kay, Don Paterson, and Kathleen Jamie whose international influence and standing is unquestionable. They are masters of the art of writing.
And looking at the lot of them slightly askance are the weirdoes. Novelist and Screenwriter Ewan Morrison, an outsider-intellectual, wrestling with the rights of the individual and the risks and rewards of community. Limmy, a comedy writer whose strange, poetic and often heartbreakingly sad work makes him impossible to pigeonhole with what we might consider the traditional stand-up. And – much admired in the pages of The Spectator in recent years – David Keenan, a novelist whose far-out experimental fiction takes readers on a psychedelic Harley-ride through the beautiful madness of masculinity.
Today, all of these extraordinary creative animals perch on the shoulders of a 42-year-old poet and prose writer who lives a quiet life in Ayrshire.
Jenny Lindsay is an icon of free speech, a courageous woman who refused to be bullied into silence, a substantial figure who comfortably ranks with Rowling, Paterson, Morrison and others as a writer of integrity and talent.
She’s also got a much-needed shift as a supply teacher next Friday so she can make her mortgage payments.
In June, Lindsay announced the forthcoming publication of her book Hounded, an examination of the strange and disturbing phenomenon of women being bullied out of public life, usually for expressing views about gender and sex that don’t align with extreme trans ideology.
Five years ago, Lindsay – then one of the country’s leading performance poets – publicly called out a trans-identifying male writer for urging attacks on lesbians at a Pride march. Lindsay was swiftly identified among her peers as the villain, received a deluge of abuse online, lost her career, all of her ‘friends’, and had to move from Edinburgh, ‘home of the Enlightenment’.
Among those who turned on Lindsay were young writers and poets she had promoted and encouraged.
So Lindsay was understandably shocked to discover, after every damned thing, that two days after announcing the publication of her book, Dr Alice Tarbuck – a literature officer with Creative Scotland – reportedly called a bookshop, urging them not to stock it because it was transphobic.
It will come as little surprise to you to learn that Creative Scotland launched a cover-up. A ‘disciplinary’ procedure was performed and Tarbuck remains in post. She was protected by the creation of a safe space for her to flourish.
This case is surely enough to condemn Creative Scotland – which recently closed its fund for artists after refusing to absorb £6.6 million of cuts passed on by the Sottish government – to closure. Arts quango staff can’t go around trying to wreck artists’ careers and keep their jobs. That’s insane.
The insanity, I’m afraid, runs deeper.
Award winning dramatist David Greig, artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, was awaiting the outcome of a funding bid made to Creative Scotland when arts worker Rosie Aspinall Priest began sending tweets attacking him over his alleged support for transphobic views. Greig had used his personal Twitter account to ‘like’ statements by the feminist campaigner and journalist Julie Bindel.
One tweet read: ‘Lads and lasses in the trenches fighting the gender madness – what is the best (very recent) example you can think of that shows how we have won this crazy war?’, the other ‘If you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian, you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned.’
Aspinall Priest wrote: ‘I wonder how Lyceum theatre staff, audiences and partner organisations feel about [its] artistic director [Greig] openly liking transphobic tweets? Really awful things on display here that do not align with the values inherent within Scotland’s theatre sector.’
A number of follow-up tweets appeared. It began to look like a hounding.
Nothing unusual in the arts about wannabes attacking successful practitioners. It’s often an unsentimental world.
There was just one thing. At the time Aspinall Priest began attacking Greig, her civil partner, Paul Burns, interim director of arts at Creative Scotland, was considering the Lyceum’s funding bid.
Imagine that happening in a procurement process in any other area of the public sector and people simply shrugging it off. You can’t because they wouldn’t.
Greig apologised for his ‘careless and harmful’ tweets, closed his social media accounts, and is now serving notice after stepping down from his role.
One Scottish government civil service insider said: ‘Say the NHS opened a bid for a new drug supplier and the partner of the person granting the contract spent the tendering process smearing one of the companies, saying their drugs were rubbish and then hounding the boss. That would be a huge scandal. People would be sacked and forensic auditors would be brought in because if you think this sort of thing is fine, you shouldn’t be allowed near a penny of taxpayers’ money.’
Peter Burnett of Edinburgh-based Leamington Books, which publishes a variety of fiction and poetry titles also has grave concerns about the arts quango.
He said: ‘Transparency may be a value Creative Scotland aspires to – but institutionally they remain, in the eyes of the average practitioner, aloof and even potentially threatening. Creative Scotland staff are always seen as “gatekeepers” and never faciliatory. It is seen as supporting middle-class and even ideologically driven projects, and never as fully democratic.’
The author Ewan Morrison said: ‘Just as the Scottish Arts Council was replaced by Creative Scotland because it was considered no longer fit for purpose, so too CS needs to be replaced by a leaner public body that is more suited to serving the needs of Scotland’s artistic communities. Creative Scotland has developed that disease that plagues large bureaucracies the world over, it has become self serving and spends time, money and resources trying to cover up its ever increasing errors. It no longer serves the arts in Scotland but serves itself and its own growth.’
Creative Scotland’s leadership team is determined to cling on, fighting off accusations of sleaze and corruption.
They can fight all they want. Creative Scotland is over. The organisation has managed to make itself hated by both politicians and artists. It exists only to feed itself and its infantile staff.
Now there are three key questions.
What are ministers going to do immediately to relieve pressure on struggling artists?
When are ministers going to start sending out redundancy notes to Creative Scotland?
And what are they going to do to stop its replacement being taken over by deranged ideologues who think you can’t be a writer if you don’t accept women can have penises?
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