What a prick

Read James Traynor's ignorant bilge from the Daily Record and weep.

That's right, dismiss people in the arts as effeminate ponces in their bow ties and tutus, as opposed to rugged working class football loving blokes like our Jim. Thinly veiled homophobia; that's the way to win an argument. Traynor's I'm-a-man-of-the-people-telling-it-like-it-is schtick is deeply phoney. He says arts folk should live in the real world and accept redundancies happen. A bit fresh for an overpaid footie pundit and gobshite tabloid columnist. No nonsense man's man Jim obviously doesn't give a stuff for Scottish Opera chorus members, but what of the hard-working carpenters, technicians and floor staff who could face the chop? What do you know, he seems to have forgotten to mention them. Readers might sympathise with them.
Of course funding the arts has to come second to the essential services, but we're a rich nation and should be able to afford sufficient funding for all these things.
Jim claims that the arts mean nothing to the Real People. That's right, Real Working Class People don't read books or go to the theatre or any of that crap. They have football, the People's Theatre. Fuck off. This is exactly the sort of pig-ignorant thinking that has destroyed the aspirations of millions of Scots for generations. We're working class, we're meant to be stupid. Fuck you Jim. Fuck you and your phoney bullshit.
This cultural attitude is more of a problem than notions of art being inaccessable. What exactly are artists suppost to do to reach out to ordinary people? Spend hundreds of thousand on one of Jack Vettriano's deeply unsexy contrivances? May I point out most tickets to Scottish Opera's La Boheme are cheaper than a good seat at Ibrox. The theatre is even cheaper. And art galleries? Free entry.
He's also quite wrong to say football doesn't get any funding. Maybe not an annual grant, but what about the millions pumped into football development at the end of last year. I have no problem with this, although you could argue that while we're shite at football, we're very good at opera so in terms of international reputation the arts deserve the money.
You're going to take poofy arts types to the mean streets of Scotland, eh? Show them what real hardship is like? Yes, cos you'd know, sitting in your flash car, filing your pompous copy from your top of the range laptop.
It also shows utter ignorance (perhaps intentionally) of what Scottish artists actually do, what they write about and make films about.
So the 55 arts leaders who wrote the open letter to Jack McConnell are pompous and arrogant whingers?
Takes one to know one.

To quote Tim from Spaced, "What a prick."