Funding cuts to flagship institutions like the Glasgow Film Theatre will deny access to the arts for our poorest citizens and kill the city’s reputation as a cultural gem, our Writer at Large, Neil Mackay, argues.

There’s a chastening and instructive moment in the latest Reith Lectures from the BBC when the bestselling Dutch historian Rutger Bregman skewers the reality of what Europe has become.

From Britain to Poland, we are now a “beautiful open-air museum, a great destination for Chinese and American tourists, a place to admire that was once the centre of the world”.

As Bregman notes, the American and Chinese economies run on technology and industry: AI, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries.

“All the American giants,” he says – “Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA, Alphabet – are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market.”

By contrast, much of the European economy, he claims, is dominated by fashion. “We’ve become the continent of handbags instead of hardware,” Bregman says.

We can set aside any understandable antipathy towards Big Tech and still take away a crucial point he is making: Europe is essentially a continent that trades on culture.

The same is true of Britain and Scotland. We’re the nation that invented the train, yet we cannot lay railway lines. We once ruled the waves; we cannot build ferries on time or on budget.

People come to Scotland, and to England, because of our culture. They love our music and our writers; they want to see our art and architecture;........

© Herald Scotland