The value of Scotland’s cultural offer
Source: gov.uk (2025-08-07)

In a keynote speech, Ian Murray confirms the UK Government's Brand Scotland campaign is partnering with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society

Speaking this morning (Aug 7) during the first week of Edinburgh’s summer festivals, at the newly-refurbished Filmhouse, Mr Murray said:

Thank you so much for that kind introduction and may I join in welcoming you all here today to my home city of Edinburgh and the centre of the world during August.

What a room full of fantastic people, the ones who make this spectacular month happen here in the city.

It’s not every Fringe performance which is lucky enough to fill out the room, I just hope none of you try and slip out half way through if it isn’t your cup of tea or, worse still, heckle, but that is the nature of the festival.

And what a fantastic place to be gathered. The Edinburgh Filmhouse, home to the world’s oldest continuous film festival, and such an important part of the Edinburgh festivals family.

But a year ago, we could not have come together in this magnificent venue. In fact, we may have been sitting at the bar in a superpub.

Many of you have been at the heart of this story in recent years, but for those of you less familiar with this home of cinema, you may not know that less than three years ago the doors firmly closed, in the aftermath of the pandemic.

It would have been too easy for the Filmhouse to follow the sad story of other historic independent cinemas and never reopen, yet here we are.

The hard work, fundraising efforts, and determination of former Filmhouse staff, customers, and performers to save part of their community, has paid off.

The “Fantastic 4” of Ginnie, James, Rod and David as former employees and passionate believers in the Filmhouse, launched the “Open the doors” campaign and my goodness, thank you to them for all they’ve achieved and why we can do this today.

And I was so proud that the UK Government was able to make a contribution to back their vision, with £1.5 million from our Community Ownership Fund. The words community and ownership being key parts of that fund.

The re-opening has helped reconnect the people of this city with the culture for which it is famous around the world.

The Filmhouse’s outreach and education team can now use the power of cinema to inspire young people across Edinburgh and Scotland.

Because while our capital city is rightly proud of its global cultural crown, I know that for too many people the films, plays, and performances which attract millions to Edinburgh can feel out of touch and out of reach.

I know that, because growing up in Wester Hailes, a council estate in the south west of Edinburgh, throughout the 1980s, the Filmhouse, and the Festivals felt a lot further away than the four miles which separated them from my home.

The Edinburgh festivals to us simply made the buses run late and was what other people did.

And it wasn’t for my lack of creative ambition - indeed it may surprise some of you to know that music was actually one of my high school subjects.

But when my place at the University of Edinburgh was threatened by my poor musical performances - specifically the drums - my music teacher pulled me aside and persuaded me that if I wanted any chance of getting into university, I had to switch to singing!

Incredibly, it worked, and off to university I went, although you will be pleased to hear I save my singing solely for the stands at Tynecastle these days.

But my love of the arts has stayed with me throughout my life and career.

And so when people ask me what motivates me in politics, yes it is a belief in empowering working class communities with good jobs and fair pay. It is about social justice, equal rights, and giving ordinary people political power.

But it is also about ensuring everyone has the chance to enjoy those things which add richness to quality of life.

The things which spark imagination, which make us laugh, or think, sometimes cry, and bring us closer to our loved ones as well as total strangers.

For me, the Edinburgh Festivals are just that.

And they aren’t just Edinburgh’s festivals.

These are international festivals, which find their home in Edinburgh.

That is why they are so powerful.

As a lifelong Edinburgh resident and an elected politician in the city for 22 years, I of course know first hand the impact the world’s largest performance arts festival has on my city, the people it brings together, the challenges it faces, and the future it hopes to enjoy.

But the Fringe is not something I know simply by virtue of being an Edinburgh lad and now an Edinburgh MP.

Rather, it is an institution which helped shape much of my early life after university.

It’s a story I’m sure I share with so many tens of thousands of sons and daughters of the Fringe, and I would like to share a little of it with you now.

It was in the summer of 1998, while working my first graduate job in finance, I took my entire annual leave to help launch a brand new part of the Edinburgh August magic – a live TV broadcast from a huge stage in Princes Street Gardens.

A large LED screen on top to entertain, for free, hundreds of thousands whilst simultaneously broadcasting on the internet and to a giant screen in London.

At the time, it felt so high tech and gave me such joy as we connected two of the UK’s cultural giants to the world.

At the end of the month, when we packed up the site, I remember feeling sad but truly inspired. I knew then that this is what I really wanted to do.

The following summer, I was back on this same project. This time promoted to be in charge of programming and infrastructure.

All my annual leave that year was spent either knee-deep in water or searching for the single most important piece of infrastructure for the fringe - gaffer tape. Or sometimes locating absconded artists.

But it was that experience, one which so many Fringe participants will recognise, which led to my first permanent job in Scotland’s cultural scene, as the operations director of a new arts-based internet TV station which had grown out of the Fringe event.

The pay was dreadful to zero, the prospects worse, but what an opportunity the fringe festivals gave to me and countless others.

An opportunity I would never have had, were it not for the international cultural ecosystem which arrives in Edinburgh each August.

From that spark, I set up my own business - 100mph Events, and got to work ensuring our live TV stage show survived at the Fringe.

The 29 days of live programming was the largest and longest art broadcast in the world at the time.

And let me share just a few highlights of that time which I think shows the diversity of the fringe and will show how it inspires others.

A young rising star violinist by the name of Nicola Benedetti, now director of the International Festival, performed with the Scottish symphony orchestra under the glare of the castle to a sold out crowd.

What an incredible show, but the night before Edinburgh had faced gale force winds (you got a good demonstration this week), which blew out the back panels of the stage.

So her virtuoso and inspirational performance was punctuated by the horns of the passing trains from Waverley. I thought it added to the percussion, the purists did not.

In the years which followed, we produced an outdoor version of the Barber of Seville opera and launched the now (relatively) famous band, Cat Empire,

We hosted Fringe stalwarts Peter Buckley HIll and Movin’ Melvin Brown - not forgetting introducing mini-tattoos.

But as my life moved on, so did technology and so did the evolution of the Fringe.

My last season, 21 years ago, ended with two remarkable events.

The community came together for a “Concert for a Landmine Free World”. 6,000 ticket holders, an evening of sunshine, a castle rock backdrop, and the most moving of concerts.

The last show I produced was a tribute to the tenth anniversary of apartheid falling in South Africa.

The late Lindiwe Mabuza, then South African High Commissioner spoke about wonderful things the festival had given to her country, and midway through her speech spontaneously burst into singing her national anthem.

Along with the entire crowd, I joined in. There was not a dry eye in the house.

And with that, my professional experience of the Fringe was over.

Leaving me with the most incredible memories, a pile of old festival t-shirts, and most importantly a passion for bringing the arts and culture to everyone, no matter your background.

So whenever someone asks, or often when they don’t, I proudly tell them I am from Edinburgh.

And we bring culture to the world.

And that is why 20 years later, now an MP and Secretary of State for Scotland in the UK Government, I was so proud to launch Brand Scotland.

A UK Government programme, which brings the best of Scottish goods, services, and culture to the rest of the world.

Boosting Scottish exports and attracting inward investment is a crucial part of our economic strategy. From our famous food and drink, to our life sciences and energy sectors, it is my job as Scottish Secretary to help these industries succeed abroad and get inward investment to support them.

As a nation, we’ve spent too long trying to sell different versions of Scotland to each other. I want to spend every hour I have the privilege of being in government to sell Scotland to the world.

Because wherever you go and say you are from Scotland it always invokes a positive response - whisky, salmon, golf, landscapes, tartan, business and, of course, culture.

And the best door opener, the best way of connecting with people in different countries and building and nurturing those vital relationships, is by bringing us together through culture.

Just yesterday, I was in Germany to launch another Brand Scotland project - symphony and sausages.

Or symphony and square sausages, as I’ve renamed it to make it even more Scottish!

As the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland performed over breakfast in Berlin, we were speaking with German businesses about creating well-paid skilled jobs here.

Earlier this year, in Washington and New York, we were able to make the biggest impact ever at Tartan Week by bringing the pipers, drummers, and dancers of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, to back up our business and political engagements.

The Fringe was there too, brilliantly led by your wonderful deputy chief executive, Lyndsey Jackson.

Lyndsey and her team brought artists and art to the streets of New York, building bridges between these cultural capitals on either side of the Atlantic.

Building connections far greater than the value of any dollar or pound and helping the people it reaches understand just a little more about who we are, why we are here, and how we can share this world.

For some, art and culture is a tool of power, of wealth. For others it is a tool of nation building, of defining who we are and who we are not.

For me, it is something which transcends states and systems, and teaches us something about the human condition which other experiences simply cannot do.

But that value, that treasure, that ability for our cultural pursuits to let us see into our souls and those around us is something we cannot take for granted.

And as the artists in this room will know better than most, warm words from politicians do not make art happen and don’t pay the bills.

You don’t want us deciding what counts as art, or what is good or bad, the audience will do that.

But you do need us to back the culture which we say we value so much.

And that is why I am so proud to be signing a new strategic partnership today between the UK Government and Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Backed by Brand Scotland funding and firmly establishing the Fringe as a core part of our global Brand Scotland programme.

Today’s event is the first product of that partnership, celebrating the connections between the Fringe and America.

Keep it Fringe US will support the next generation of emerging American talent at the Fringe and I am delighted that we are joined today by performers from across the USA as well as one of Scotland’s most famous stars of stage and screen, Brian Cox.

I would like to personally thank Brian for all you do for the arts in this country.

American performers are such an important part of the Fringe, as well as always playing a starring role in the Tattoo and across all the festivals this month.

And while recognising some of the wonderful people we have here today, I want to welcome Tony Lankester to his first Fringe as the new CEO, the whole of Scotland wishes you every success

And I want to put on record my enormous thanks to Shona McCarthy for superbly leading the festival for almost a decade.

And of course this partnership is just one part of the increasingly close relationship between the Fringe and the UK Government.

In recent years we have invested £6 million in the brilliant new Fringe HQ and awarded 360 bursaries of £2,500 each to help emerging artists bring their work to an ever more expensive Edinburgh.

Our Brand Scotland partnership is the next step on that journey and a firm commitment from the UK Government that we are backing Scottish culture.

We back it with our words and we back it with our actions.

Creative industries is one of the eight key sectors in our UK industrial strategy.

The sector already acts as a dynamic growth engine for all parts of the UK, and in Scotland we are investing in its future.

Elsewhere in this city, the UK Government is investing to refurbish the King’s Theatre.

Up in Dundee we recently announced further funding for the incredible V&A museum on the waterfront.

And we are backing a new cultural hub in Kilmarnock, to protect the town’s heritage and make it accessible to all.

In the coming months, Brand Scotland will be in India and Japan. We will be in Australia, in France, and in Sweden.

And when we take Scottish businesses, goods, and services with us, Scottish culture will be there too. The partnership we sign today will put the Fringe at the heart of that work.

The Fringe will help power and open doors for Brand Scotland, and Brand Scotland will power and open doors for the Fringe.

It may even inspire other young people in this city to throw themselves into the opportunities and joy which the Fringe provides, just as it did for me.

So let me leave you today by sharing the commitment of Brand Scotland and the whole UK Government to the Fringe, to the Edinburgh festivals, and to Scottish culture.

To all the artists in the room, to the writers, producers and technicians, the flyerers, to those heroes who always find the gaffer tape and cable ties just in time - and to everyone else who brings culture to our streets, our screens, our stages, and our communities.

Thank you, we have your back, and I hope you have a fantastic August here in Edinburgh.

Ends