Welcome to your midweek edition of The Inquirer.
We’ve got two types of drama for you today - artistic and political. Both, in fact, combine in our report on the latest developments at the City Chambers.
More on that and Will Quinn’s final pick of the best the Fringe has to offer below, after your regular midweek roundup.
Your Edinburgh Briefing
HUGH’S THAT? Hollywood star Hugh Grant was spotted enjoying a visit to North Berwick yesterday leaving locals wondering if he was doing anything more than indulging his love of a round of golf. The 65-year-old actor and his wife Swedish TV producer Anna Elisabet Eberstein were spotted getting into a Ferrari on Forth Street.
PARKING PAUSE: Hugh will have had to pay North Berwick’s controversial new parking charges despite a partial victory for campaigners fighting against them. East Lothian Council has agreed to put the roll-out of the on-street charges across four other towns on hold until it carries out a reviews of their impact on local businesses on North Berwick.
UNI STRIKES: Students face fresh disruption at Edinburgh University after staff announced further industrial action in their ongoing protest over job cuts. The University and College Union says its members boycott of teaching and other duties for weeks starting next month will make some course untenable.
HOUSING PROGRESS: The city council has ended its freeze on allocating council houses, put in place to prioritise people facing homelessness, following progress in tackling the city’s housing crisis. Some 1473 affordable homes have been completed by the local authority and partners, 1144 sites have been started and 866 additional suitable temporary accommodation properties purchased. A new grant scheme is being introduced offering eligible owners of empty homes up to £20,000 to bring properties up to a lettable standards, in return for letting the property for at least three years.
TRAMS BY JOVI: An “intensive” tram service is to be run by Edinburgh trams to serve the sell-out crowd makings it way to and from the Bon Jovi concert at Murrayfield Stadium tomorrow night. Edinburgh Trams confirmed they will run additional services, although with the Princes Street hotel fire aftermath still closing the route at the West End, services will obviously be restricted to running between there and the Airport.
The city council versus the Festivals
If you thought the Festival Fireworks had been cancelled, then think again.
This year the annual display has been replaced by an incendiary dispute between Fringe chief executive Tony Lankester and the leader of the city council Jane Meagher.
That culminated in Lankester accusing the council of putting the future of the Festivals in “jeopardy” and not being “serious about being a cultural capital”.
In response, Meagher effectively told him and other unhappy Festival chief executives to grow up. (“Please don't just use the media to fight battles. Let's be a bit more mature about it. Let's talk.”)
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be when the council agreed to introduce the UK’s first compulsory, city-wide Visitor Levy.
We were told the so-called “tourist tax” would boost the city’s arts and heritage by ensuring visitors made a contribution towards Edinburgh’s under-pressure infrastructure and public services.
Tomorrow, councillors will be asked to decide on a second attempt to allocate the share of the proceeds of the new tax - which has £5 million in its first month alone - allocated to the arts.
The ‘big winner’ looks set to be the major refurbishment King’s Theatre which is set to receive nearly £10 million in Visitor Levy funding over the next 30 years. The new tax has come to the rescue of a project which like many major construction schemes has seen its costs spiral over the last few years in this case from £20 million in 2018 to £41 million today.
There has been some controversy over the full transparency of the decision-making process, but it is exactly the kind of work which the Levy was designed to support. This is a significant investment in a cultural venue used substantially by visitors but also enjoyed and treasured by city residents. The allocation of Levy funds will ensure the cost of securing its long-term future doesn’t either cripple the venue or drain general council funds.
That is perhaps the one relatively straightforward bit.
Other all-year-round arts enterprises, such as the Royal Lyceum, Whale Arts agency in Wester Hailes and North Edinburgh Arts centre in Muirhouse, are in line for an 11.5% increase in their council funding under a blanket approach to all 28 of the cultural organisations it funds. That includes relatively smaller festivals such as the Science Festival and Imaginate children’s Festival.
Councillors seem determined to spread the cash widely around the city and its arts organisations despite a warning from council officials that it appears to be breaking the rules under which the tax was set up in doing so.
In their report to councillors, city officials feel obliged to warn that “the majority of actions funded… are specifically targeted at local community engagement and support, activities not supported by the aims and objectives of the Visitor Levy”.
The legislation under which the Levy was introduced stipulates that the money it raises must be used to “sustain, support or develop facilities or services which are substantially for visitors”.
The big bone of contention of course is the level of funding directed to the major Festivals.
The council seems unable to decide whether it accepts that the major Festivals are an essential part of the city’s economic infrastructure - and therefore worth sustained investment from the local authority - or sees them as a cash cow from which it can extract funds to invest elsewhere in the city.
Meagher says she is keen to find a plan that “works for” the Festivals yet has now brought forward two plans which - even after her Labour administration was bounced into offering a better deal by the opposition SNP and Lib Dems - would leave them worse off under the Visitor Levy.
The Book Festival offers the starkest example. Shorn of commercial sponsorship revenue and facing soaring costs due to rocketing accommodation costs, the Visitor Levy is making its life even harder.
The new tax has added £10,000 to the cost of accommodation for visiting authors and the like, yet in return it is being offered just £2,300 from Levy funds after the council rethought its initial plans. It is possible councillors will ramp that up even further by councillors tomorrow, but any feasible increase will still leave the Book Festival out of pocket.
The Fringe will receive just £8,625 from Levy funds under the more generous plan being presented to councillors tomorrow. The International Festival is slightly better off, with £221,500 heading its way under the revised plan, offsetting a £50,000 increase in its accommodation bill. It too though is frustrated at the level of funding on offer and has joined the Fringe and Book Festival in calling for a fundamental rethink.
The main choice facing councillors tomorrow is likely to be agreeing the 11.5% increase or more than doubling that to a 25% rise in their council funding, a plan being pushed by opposition SNP councillors.
That would placate the major festivals, at least for now, but would require the scrapping of a £1 million innovation fund for next year which is intended to be open to currently unfunded arts organisations. That, officials warn, could leave the council open to legal action from organisations who are frozen out.
And this is just round one, the first year of distributing funds from the Visitor Levy. Whatever is decided today, a new three-year plan for the city’s investment in the arts has to be agreed before the next tranche of funding is allocated. That is where the real winners and losers will be decided - and the politically-riven council may have arrived at a clearer idea of its priorities. By then, however, it will be a different council, because there is the small matter of council elections next May.
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The best of what’s left of the Fringe
Will Quinn on the late discoveries, hidden gems and final-week triumphs to close out your August
Greetings, Pop Pickers!
Ok folks, many of the shows I’ve recommended over the past few weeks are still available if your finger finds those ticket links quickly enough. But as we stagger towards the finish line of this glorious, exhausting marathon, I’m here to suggest a few more that might have flown completely under your radar until now.
If you’re hunting for a final slice of Fringe magic before the “Sold Out” boards go up for good, here is your definitive guide to the best of what’s left. Inquirer readers, get your highlighters ready! Alright? Let’s get it on...
Comedy & Stand-Up
When it comes to sophisticated stand-up, Chris Grace: 88% (Assembly George Square Studios) is a great choice. As I noted in my review, it’s “an artful blend of acting skill and left-field opinions which prompts thought as well as laughter”. Grace sets out to prove that you can be quite mad at someone—say, 12%—and remain friends. Dropping deft context-bombs on tricky topics like AI and age-gap relationships, he delivers “a rare, if cheeky, attempt to inject some nuance into a Fringe stand-up scene which can tend to the all-or-nothing; and it works a treat”.
