Seòmar agus comataidhean

I have a supplementary question to Donald Cameron’s first question, which was about closed and restricted buildings. Am I right in saying—I will be embarrassed if I am wrong—that Clackmannan tower is one of your buildings?

In fact, I think that we have corresponded on it in the past. Clackmannan tower has been closed for a long time and, as far as I know, there are no plans to open it. Do you have an update on what is happening with it, given its significance?

I have to declare an interest, because my partner is the minister responsible for this policy area. I declared that when I first joined the committee, but I will also declare it now. I thought about it last week, but did not do it.

I enjoyed your analogy about the lack of stonemasons, and I thought that it was appropriate that you talked about putting a finger in the dike.

On Clackmannan tower, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that it is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year—except for St Andrew’s day. However, the problem is that it is only open for external viewing, and my point was really about internal viewing. I have the benefit of being able to access the internet at the moment, which witnesses do not, and I see that that has been talked about since at least 2017. The reason why I mention the tower is—this will be true of so many different sites and buildings that you have—that it was owned by Robert the Bruce. It is said that he held a parliament there as well, but I do not know whether that is true. You can see why there is a broader interest.

My question is related to an issue that I raised last week. You mentioned the importance of ticket receipts and the number of people going through, and I would like to hear a bit more about that. Last week, I said that the consequence of us taking William Wallace’s sword to the United States and calling it the Braveheart sword was a huge uptick in the numbers going through the Wallace monument, which is owned by the council, not by HES. In a situation in which finances are grim and about to get grimmer, we can tap into the history and legacy of some of the buildings, particularly if a diaspora of overseas visitors might be interested. Due to cost of living pressures, it will probably be hard to get more people from domestic locations to go. How seriously and how vigorously do you consider maximising revenue from that source?

Inevitably, we have already heard comments about the scarcity of resources to allow people to do the things that they need to do to look after what we currently have. However, in relation to potential new sites, I might have missed this, but I did not hear any reference to economic regeneration.

I know that we can all list various sites, so I will mention a couple. Scotland’s first industrial production site for whisky, which was all taken down to London, was in Kennet, near Kincardine. In fact, the slip that it used to go down is still there. It is a roofless building that has trees growing up through it. The national lottery would not touch it because it thought that it was a magical building. Not far from that site, at the back of the council buildings in Alloa, there is the grave of John Jameson—he was Scottish, not Irish—who worked at the former site.

Outwith my constituency, there is the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell in Edinburgh. In Canada, there are, I think, two visitor centres for Alexander Graham Bell, and there is one in the United States. We have his birthplace, but we do nothing with it.

Might economic regeneration and an entrepreneurial helicopter view of new sites help to produce revenues for different organisations? Does the toolkit factor that in?

I want to come back to the previous question, but I will ask it in a different way. Yesterday’s autumn statement is now being read, and one of the implications is a further crunch on public services, especially in 2027-28. Given the pressures that are being talked about, how rigorously are we examining other options?

I understand Ailsa Macfarlane’s point that, if you open an attraction, there can be long-term costs, and it might not attract the numbers that you want. However, just around the corner from Alexander Graham Bell’s birthplace, there is the Johnnie Walker visitor centre, which has just been established and is going great guns. It has taken over the entire House of Fraser building. It shows that that sort of thing is possible. Are we properly exploiting—if that is the right word—some of the assets that we have?

I have two quick examples that perhaps relate to what our papers call “intangible cultural heritage”. First, the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum discovered that it had the world’s oldest football. Instead of keeping it on a dusty shelf, the people there brought it out; when they did so, there were international satellite news feeds from around the world at the Smith, and the football then went to Hamburg for the world cup—even though Scotland was not at it—and appeared at the start of the competition. It had a huge influence.

Secondly, we took William Wallace’s sword over to New York and had a huge response to that. The Wallace monument visitor figures went through the roof.

Are we rigorously examining other opportunities? The question might relate to museums in particular, although I would point out that, when we had an evidence session with library representatives, I mentioned the fact that the central library in Edinburgh sits next to where witches were executed as well as to Greyfriars Bobby and suggested that the library could try to exploit that. Given the pressure on public services, are we sufficiently and rigorously looking at alternatives to generate funds that will allow us to do the other things that we want to do? My fear is that public resources will just not be there to the same extent in future.

Maybe Lucy Casot could go first.

I suppose that there is a distinction to be drawn with regard to the Government’s obligation to look across the whole scope of things, but if the Government and the committee can agree a position where what we receive has more relevance and less volume, that will be good.

In response to Mark Ruskell, you mentioned talking to the EU ourselves. Obviously, the EU is the source of much of the legislation, but you might be aware that this Parliament and this committee have the ability to nominate to CALRE—the Conference of Regional Legislative Assemblies—which I have been nominated to, or the proximity group or whatever it is called to the Committee of the Regions. However, we will not have a member on that for many months to come, which I think undermines the ability of this committee and this Parliament to have those direct conversations. I do not know whether it is proper to do this—I know that the committee clerks are working on it—but could the Government prevail upon the UK Government to speed the process up as quickly as possible?

I listened to the exchange between you and Kate Forbes, in which there was mention of common sense. I wonder whether that makes you the Scottish Government’s minister for common sense. It seems to be the fashion, these days, to appoint such ministers.

I have two points. First, you mentioned accession. Accession is often portrayed as solidifying alignment. However, it also solidifies divergence, as happened with Maastricht—for example, with Danish second homes or the UK opt-out from the social chapter. If the EU proceeded with gene editing, I would be happy to see an opt-out on that. I just make that point because we sometimes get the wrong impression of what alignment actually means.

Given what you said about the volume of work in the UK Parliament and the resources devoted to scrutiny—including four legal advisers—and what I think is a fairly common academic assumption that there is a real lack of genuine scrutiny of European legislation beyond, perhaps, the House of Lords, are we not setting ourselves up to try to do far too much? You mentioned looking across the whole scope of things. I am fairly new to the committee, and maybe this has already been done, but might it be better for the Government and the committee to agree what was relevant and thereby make activity much more focused, as long as the committee or individual members could ask for information about areas that were not covered? Would it not be better to be more proportionate and focus on the areas that are more likely to be of interest to both Scotland and the committee? That would make it easier on officials, given the breadth of the stuff that they could be doing.

Thinking back to the Brexit debate, two scenarios were set out: one was that we would reach sunny uplands, full of opportunity, with no or very little regulation. On the other side, it was said that Brexit would be an enormous act of self-harm. I am getting a distinct impression from the sector about which of those two scenarios you feel is being played out. Perhaps this sector, more than any other, shows the folly of cutting ourselves off from a huge market right on our doorstep. It is depressing to hear some of the stories about people who have stopped working in their profession or stopped performing or touring.

I have two quick questions. The first is the extent to which the things that we have been discussing were predicted or predictable. Was it possible to know that those things were going to happen, or have some of them become apparent subsequently? What proportion of things does that apply to—if you can make a guesstimate of that? That question is for any member of the panel.

My second question is specifically for Lisa Whytock. I was quite surprised at this, but I am new to the committee, so this might be something that everyone else knows. You said that Scotland was too small a country to sustain full-time musicians. If that is the case, is there a cut-off in country sizes for the ability to sustain full-time musicians? Do you have an idea of what size of country would be able to do that?

I invite any member of the panel to comment on the things that have had a big effect that have become apparent since Brexit that were perhaps not predicted or predictable beforehand.

It is very interesting to hear your comments. I spent a year in Canada at the University of Prince Edward Island and I worked for quite a time on the Committee of the Regions, which is mentioned in our papers.

I am particularly interested in Professor Cornago’s comments about progress and regress in relation to how this thing works. We have a quote from President Biden, which says that the foreign policy of Canada in peacetime is to be at war with Quebec. It feels a bit like that in the UK just now, in my view. We have an increasingly insecure and paranoid UK Government that is now saying that, when a Scottish minister tries to be active internationally, they first have to speak to the UK ambassador or ambassadorial staff. Also, like other parts of the UK, Scotland was completely cut out of the discussions on Brexit and the trade discussions afterwards. It feels a bit like a curtain is coming down.

Professor Cornago, I think that you said that the progress and regress often depends on the political imperatives. For example, if the Basque representatives could provide the balance in the Spanish Parliament, that would empower them. I wonder whether, in either of your experiences, there is any pragmatic way to get a basis on which the Governments might be better able to work together, other than a sort of political force majeure.

On trade and industry, our position is pretty much the same as Quebec’s. We have Scottish Development International, which is the most successful body of its type in any part of the UK, apart from the south-east of England, at getting foreign direct investment. Generally, however, outwith trade and investment, how best could the two interests—the UK Government and the Scottish Government, in what is obviously a very centralised unitary state, unlike the confederation that you have in Canada—rub along to get to a more productive relationship, outwith the political ins and outs of representation in the UK Parliament, if that makes sense?