Tiffany Jenkins talks to Scotland’s culture minister about the new ‘creative industry’ quango
The unexpected hit of this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival was Mike Russell MSP, the SNP minister for culture, external affairs and the constitution. Surprisingly for a leading Scottish Nationalist, there was no mention of Rabbie Burns. Nor was it a populist pitch — bigging up bestselling Scottish writers like Irvine Welsh or Ian Rankin. Instead, he spoke of his love for the Chilean communist writer Pablo Neruda, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and even that pillar of Victorian imperialism, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Whatever you think of his politics, you can’t call Mike Russell parochial.
Russell’s cultural hinterland helps to explain why he is winning over the Scottish arts community, a group suspicious of politicians, especially nationalist ones, whose idea of culture may well be a tartan kailyard of bagpipes and Burns.
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