As the SNP promises a National Performing Company for Traditional Music, arts writer Derek McArthur wonders if it will just be yet another meaningless exercise in branding and tourism.

As critical as I am of how the Scottish Government operates the cultural sphere, the SNP are getting quite a bit right with their election promises.

Yesterday, the party revealed plans for a minimum basic income for artists if it returned to power in Holyrood. Based on the success of a similar scheme in Ireland, the SNP is promising creatives and industry workers £15,000 a year to continue with their work.

It is a genuinely tangible move that can shake up a constantly at-risk and underfunded sector, where a whole class of innovative and imaginative people are subjected to a gruelling and unnecessary hustle just to create.

When I pushed for the idea previously in this column, the reaction from the old guard was predictable: why should a hardworking taxpayer help pay the bills of an artist?

A monthly basic income for artists working in Scotland? What a marvellous idea

But it only confirmed to me the sneaking suspicion that the artist and their art is seen as materially non-contributory to society, as if a creative mind is somehow less worth to the well-being and diversity of public life than a logical or analytical one. It is........

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