Edinburgh Festival is back again – but who does it benefit?

The cultural commentator Joyce McMillan caught the mood of hope and expectation after two years of postponements: “It’s a beautiful, cool, bright, breezy August day in Edinburgh, and the atmosphere out there on the first Saturday of the Edinburgh Fringe is just wonderful.” She continued: “I know the event has problems, but I’ve never seen so many people look so happy, and so obviously delighted to be where they are.”

Laudable sentiments. Edinburgh like everywhere hasn’t had it easy over the past few years. Its International Festival and Fringe had to be mothballed, and both are eager to get the show back on the road. All this raises tricky issues for Edinburgh’s future development – whose interests are being served and whose future is being created, and is it the one we actually want?

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Edinburgh historically has witnessed many periods of growth and decline, its place changing in Scotland, and how it is viewed here and internationally changing too. Central to the city’s story has been that of the Edinburgh petty bourgeoise elite – lawyers, accountants, bankers – and wider middle classes – who have shaped much of the city’s development.

In the 1980s, Edinburgh elected a Labour council for the first time which, inspired by Ken Livingstone’s GLC, embraced progressive economic development and cultural investment, working with the finance sector to aid employment and event infrastructure through developments such as the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

This fertile period paid dividends, and post-1999 and the arrival of the Scottish Parliament it seemed that Edinburgh’s time had arrived. This was the era of the long boom, of city movers and shakers telling you that “the Edinburgh bubble would not burst”, and believing the hype of bankers like RBS’s Fred Goodwin.

Goodwin (above) crashed RBS in a spree of reckless acquisitions and spending which also saw the Bank of Scotland implode: all rather embarrassing for the Edinburgh establishment. Yet more than a decade later, despite the crash, Brexit and economic storm clouds, the city’s financial success continues, but increasingly disconnected to the local economy and concerns.

Across Edinburgh there is a palpable feeling of unease at the growth mindset and its consequences. Edinburgh’s festivals are eager to get back to 2019 levels but do they really want to continue the treadmill? Fergus Linehan made this explicit when director of the Edinburgh International Festival pre-Covid, saying: “The idea that the city or the festivals have reached some kind of capacity is nonsense. You can’t just stop. The notion that Edinburgh is full could be very deadening.”

Similarly the commercialisation of public space and events by the likes of Underbelly, who have in recent years secured the contracts for such occasions as Edinburgh’s Hogmanay party and Princes Street Gardens Christmas Market, goes on. Huge amounts of public money is deployed which leads to controls and damage of public spaces and everyday life with little accountability and with local people often inconvenienced.

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Underpinning this are deeper social concerns. There is a housing crisis in the city, lack of affordable accommodation, overgrowth of AirBnB, and action by the Scottish Government and Edinburgh City Council with Scotland’s first short-term lets control zone away to go live in September.

The latter has proven too much for a sector which has grown on the back of lack of regulation and unfettered marketisation of property.

Then there is how Edinburgh is portrayed by the outside world. London media takes at Festival time are a time-honoured part of this. The Guardian last weekend used four pages to recount the most memorable Festival experiences of seventeen acts – one American, one Australian, one Indian, fourteen English and zero Scottish. This might be predictable but does point to how Edinburgh is seen by the UK media at festival time – an extension of itself and little to do with Scotland.

All of this raises big questions about what kind of Edinburgh do we aspire to? Is it just the continuation of the growth model and more of the same, or do the multiple crises and disruptions of our times offer a chance to at least consider something different? What are the consequences of the distributional choices of the Scottish Government for Edinburgh? Are they gaining fair support in being championed, or being prioritised unfairly?

This raises the thorny subject of which parts of Scotland are the heartland of the SNP’s vision of a future Scotland, and how is that manifested? Glasgow and the West of Scotland was the centre of Labour’s idea of Scotland. But with the decline of Labour electorally, Glasgow and the West have lost their place and continue to struggle, not aided by the lack of SNP promotion and strategic leadership of the city.

Informing this is the atrophied nature of local democracy and the constrained nature of local government funding. It is not an accident that Glasgow municipally is not in a good place, while Edinburgh’s city leadership have little original to say. Those bright, breezy days of Edinburgh’s 1980s pioneering council leadership, or Glasgow rebranding and remaking itself in the same decade seem a long time ago.

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Who speaks and advocates for Edinburgh, Glasgow and Scotland’s other cities, towns and communities in an age of Scottish Government centralisation and control, and unrepentant, unfettered capitalism? Is the best we can really hope for that Edinburgh sells itself as a twelve months of the year “Festival City”, while hoping that trickle-down economics and capital make the city work beyond its insider classes?

Finally, comes the prospect of independence. This would majorly impact Edinburgh – making it the capital of a self-governing, sovereign nation-state. Independence would fundamentally alter the city’s status, swagger, and sense of itself with a new domestic and global class emerging centre-stage, connected to government, business, lobbying and diplomacy.

The possibilities of independence for Edinburgh need to be discussed now. Is future Edinburgh a bigger version of the present – serving and servicing the global class while at the same time failing to address the ongoing and escalating social crisis and sense of fragmentation and division that increasingly disfigures Western societies, the UK and Scotland?

George Kerevan (above) was at the heart of those 1980s economic and cultural interventions and believes Edinburgh’s current success has little progressive about it. He characterises it as centred on “the dominance of global finance capital, a debt-financed and ultimately unsustainable property boom that gives the illusion of prosperity and a consumer economy based increasingly on entertainment – restaurants, pubs, shops, taxis and hotels.”

The debate about Edinburgh’s future is not just about our capital but affects and is about the whole of Scotland. As well as talk about independenceIs it really enough to pose a steady as she goes economic and social conformity as the world economy and order totters?

Some will say that we don’t need to discuss the future of Edinburgh and should concentrate on getting growth back on track after Covid. Others will say such concerns such be addressed the other side of independence.

But the future of Edinburgh and Scotland are intertwined, and if we are to build an inclusive, successful, innovative country which addresses poverty and inequality then we have to aspire to an Edinburgh and Scotland that is about more than our own version of the current economic and social status quo.