How did Edinburgh come to be ‘festival city’? Consider this opening comment in the 2018 report by the consulting company BOP: ‘Edinburgh is an undisputed world leader as a festival city. The innovation and momentum of its Festivals inspire people from local audiences through to international cultural peers.’ (BOP Consulting 2018: 2). The report continues:

We have grown used to cultural boot-strapping in the modern world, as cities reinvent themselves to put distance between themselves and their industrial past. Bilbao has its Guggenheim museum, a catalyst for cultural regeneration. Glasgow, Edinburgh's near-neighbour is, these days, miles better, and has reinvented itself as city of culture.

The competition, though, is a cut-throat business. The consulting company BOP called its 2015 report Thundering Hooves, ‘metaphorically named after the sound of the competition catching up with Edinburgh’, but ‘Edinburgh is the undisputed world leader as a festival city’, and no amount of catch-up by other places will alter that, it argues. Still, by 2018, that ‘the’ has become ‘an’, just in case any other place has pretensions to the cultural crown.

This chapter will examine how Edinburgh has been ‘branded’, and with what effect; examine the origins of the ‘official’ Festival; look at ‘festival adjuncts’, better known as the Fringe; the role of the Traverse Theatre; and what it all means in terms of living with these things. In the classical ‘you’ll have had your tea’ mode Edinburgh is infamous for, we might agree with the anonymous citizen who commented: ‘I quite liked the Festival, I even enjoyed it. All in all, we were none the worse for it.’

BRANDING PLACE

The origins and development of Edinburgh as ‘festival city’ is a form of modern branding, an ongoing process of ‘place-making’, of cultural boosterism.

Take part in any social occasion in Edinburgh, and sooner or later someone will ask you this question. The same one is asked in the west of Scotland –but that is about religion –which foot you kick with, is the cruder version. In Edinburgh, this is a question about social class, or more precisely, social status. It is a question not about what you earn, but about your connections and social networks, and possibly even your values. It seeks to place you in the scheme of things, the degree to which you are well-connected. If you reply, like this author, that you were not educated in Edinburgh, then the question is quickly judged to be irrelevant. It is really about being educated in the city and where you fit in socially.

Why should it matter so much? Because around one-fifth of secondary school pupils in Edinburgh attend ‘private’ schools, a much higher percentage than other Scottish cities. How we describe such schools is a vexed question (hence the quotation marks around ‘private’). Perhaps the most common epithet is ‘Independent’ schools, in juxtaposition to ‘public’ schools, but arguably neither of those terms is helpful. Because such schools have charitable status, they are able to offset costs against tax –a bone of political contention –and, one might aver, they are as a consequence not truly ‘Independent’. The term also implies that other schools are ‘dependent’ (on state funding). Then there is the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools, but that distinction is bedevilled by its misuse in England, where ‘public’ means no such thing. In any case, in Scotland ‘public school’ is literally etched in to the stonework of many primary schools to render a nonsense such a descriptor for what are in essence ‘private’ schools. The preference in this article is for ‘fee-paying’ which has the merit of being a categorical term, at least since the mid-1970s when ‘grant-aided’ schools were abolished; to be discussed later. On the other side, the term ‘education authority’ schools has the merit of being self-descriptive in terms of how they are governed –by the local authority. So throughout this chapter, the terms ‘fee-paying’ and ‘education authority’ are preferred.

What kind of place is this Edinburgh? Why does it invite questions about who runs it? Consider that last question. On the face of it, it would seem obvious –after all, it seems a city with secrets; in Abercrombie's words, ‘an ancient and venerated shrine’ –but who wants to live in a shrine? Behind the façade, if that's what it is, there seems to be another story, or, rather, stories. Indeed, perhaps it is best to think that there are multiple Edinburghs behind Stewart Conn's sliver of ice.

ECOLOGY OF GAMES

Let us return to Norton Long's notion of a city as an ecology of games. Perceptively, Long observed: ‘It is psychologically tempting to envision the local territorial system as a group with a governing “they”’ (Long 1958: 252). In other words, we are expecting to find, and none more so than in Edinburgh, a close nexus of powerful people who make the key decisions. Why Edinburgh? There would seem a prima facie case for there being a governing ‘they’. After all, the city was run by a peculiar breed of parochial politics for a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s. Readers of this book will recall the hegemony of the so-called Progressive party until its collapse in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it drew disproportionately on the local business class, merchants in the main, who held the city's affairs firmly in its grip. They dominated its economy, its politics and its culture, its schools, even though it was left to James Bridie, a Glaswegian, to remark that ‘Edinburgh prides itself in not being interested in anything at all’ (quoted in Miller 1996: 3–4). One might argue that such insouciance was a front. Bridie's may seem a harsh judgement in a city of festivals as well as its accolade as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lying behind the changing fortunes in politics in Edinburgh is its changing economy. It is, however, not a question of reading one off the other, assuming that ‘politics’ is simply the expression of the ‘economy’. Furthermore, we have grown so used to defining Edinburgh as a city of professions, money and culture that we tend to assume that this has always been so. Our examination of the city's politics indicates otherwise. Small, local, capital had expression in its ‘non-political’ politics for such a long time, occupying most of the twentieth century, and thus shaping what came after it.

In 1914, the Merchant Company of Edinburgh proclaimed its local patriotism:

This begged many questions which the Merchant Company was aware of. It was no longer

The Company, in other words, now represented ‘many various and sometimes antagonistic interests’.

EDINBURGH CASTES

It had tended to be ever thus. John Heiton's Castes of Edinburgh, fifty years previously, had made that plain:

Robbie Gray's study of the labour aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh showed how status differences –caste distinctions –ran all the way down Edinburgh's class system, but that ‘the city's notorious snobbery seems to have derived from social and political rivalries encouraged by this heterogeneity of the wealthier classes’ (Gray 1976: 20). It is not difficult to characterise Edinburgh as a city of class distinctions –‘ snobbery’ –but these social distinctions were not bi-modal, but subtle and multi-varied.

Another book on Edinburgh: why one of those? There is, indeed, no shortage of books on the city, but they are mainly about buildings and history and heritage; nothing wrong with that, but arguably it gives a distorted impression of Edinburgh. When I came to Edinburgh in the 1960s as a student, Sandy Youngson’s book The Making of Classical Edinburgh was about to be published. Edinburgh University Press was nervous about sales, and drummed up subscribers whose names appeared at the back of the first edition. They need not have worried, as Youngson’s book became a classic in its own right, especially in its sumptuous first edition. To a young impecunious student (who could not afford to subscribe) it was a lesson in writing lucidly and laterally, for Youngson was an economist, or rather, an economic historian, and was able to tell the story of the building of the New Town across economics, politics and culture. It was, though, about classical Edinburgh, of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to a student of sociology the puzzle was who ran (and runs) this city today.

In the 1970s, with my friend and colleague Brian Elliott, I began a study of landlordism in Edinburgh, and in 1989 we published it with the title Property and Power in a City: The Sociological Significance of Landlordism. Truth to tell, the book was far more about landlordism than it was about property and power in Edinburgh, but it sowed seeds which lay in the ground a long time and took a while to come to fruition. We got side-tracked by writing another book, The City: Patterns of Domination and Conflict (1982). The allusion to Max Weber’s classic The City was deliberate, because we thought that much of urban studies in those days underplayed the role of politics and power for our liking. Although we thought of ourselves as urban sociologists, other activities intervened. Brian went to Canada, to Vancouver, and had much to say about property and power in that city. I got heavily involved in the sociology and politics of Scotland, culminating in The New Sociology of Scotland, published in 2016.

The question, Who Runs Edinburgh?, never went away. Coming to a city you do not know because you were not born and brought up there can be disconcerting, and a source of puzzlement, because you cannot take many things for granted.

Consider the jokes about Edinburgh. They are about reserve, snobbery and meanness (‘East Windy, West Endy’; ‘fur coat and no knickers’; ‘You’ll have had your tea?’; ‘Queen Anne front; Mary Anne back’). Behind them one can sense a process of decision-making which implies a city in which status matters rather than simply social class. Status is about social and cultural power, rather than about money and wealth, although it would be foolish to treat these as distinct spheres. Recall the comment by John Heiton with which we began this book: ‘“Look you, sir. Your city is a very fine city, but it swarms with castes”. The American was right: Our beautiful Modern Athens is in a swarm of castes, worse than ever was old Egypt or is modern Hindostan’ (Heiton 1859: 1). Edinburgh: as a city of castes, verging on the conspiratorial.

THE SOCIAL WORLDS OF EDINBURGH

In this chapter and the next, I will consider these spheres, first, those who inhabit the shady social worlds, based indubitably on wealth, but discreetly manifest, underplayed and often unspoken. In Edinburgh, you don't flaunt it. This is the world of clubs, associations which you do not join without an invitation, and without knowing who else is a member. If you have to ask to join, then you’re not their sort of person. Fuelling this world, the story goes, is a complex hierarchy of schools, many, but not all, in the private sector. If Edinburgh is a city of castes, then the question what school did you go to? becomes the key to open doors, and we will examine that in Chapter 6. There is, however, a complex relationship between rhetoric and reality. One might believe that Edinburgh is a hierarchical and closed society –it has myth-status –but we cannot take that for granted, at least in the times we live in. Past and present are in a curious relationship: we cannot rule out that once upon a time the city's caste-like culture was more important than it is now, while accrediting the myth of caste with considerable power to define the situation as all too credible. But myths have a habit of living on and dragging out in their after-life.

The World of Clubs

First, we will explore the world of clubs and associations, by picking out a few which come up in Edinburgh conversations.

Why study any city or ‘place’ these days? The conventional argument is that power has moved away from localities, first, to reside at the level of the state, and then at the global level. There seems little point in focusing on localities, even ones as putatively interesting as Edinburgh, a historic capital city, historic in both senses: once the capital of an independent state, as well as a city full of old buildings, and one with an international reputation for culture reflected, above all, in its festival(s).

There is another intriguing reason for studying Edinburgh. It is a capital city, albeit one which is ‘historic’ (formally ending in 1707). That may seem obvious, but it introduces another level of tension: between the local and the national. Simply put, to what extent is the city operating to serve its citizens and hinterland, and to what extent fulfilling its role as a national capital? This matters, because while not the capital of an independent state, there are civil institutions to be housed and serviced: of law, courts, professions, social and political order and civil regulation. The fact that there is a parliament in Edinburgh since 1999 makes the point: that is both a national as well as a local institution. Furthermore, Edinburgh is a small city, of half a million people, small in proportional terms –less than 10 per cent of Scotland's population –compared with the likes of London, Paris or even Dublin, which has about a quarter of Ireland’s. Accommodating national agencies is, arguably, a challenge for a small city; think of Bonn in West Germany before reunification, or Ottawa in Canada, dwarfed alongside Toronto and Montreal. While Edinburgh receives national financial support for its duties as a capital city, there are tensions, most notably over tourist footfall. Such tensions, like points of conflict, are analytically interesting because they help to make explicit various systems of power and influence. The more contested they are, the easier it is to see power in action.

STUDYING POWER

We might well ask: who does power studies these days? That tradition of studying local elites, notably in the US in the 1950s and 1960s (associated with Robert Dahl, Nelson Polsby, Floyd Hunter), ended long ago.

Why write about Edinburgh's trams in a book about who runs Edinburgh? Studies of local power often run aground on the rock of assumptions; that non-decisions are as interesting as actual decisions. The Edinburgh trams issue, and the ensuing inquiry, gives us a glimpse of structures of power and influence. Who matters, and who doesn’t? Who pulls strings, and why? Which constellations of power are drawn in to bring things about, or in negative form, to prevent an outcome? And are there institutions and organisations which matter more than most; vestiges of power and influence? Thus, we are likely to learn more from controversies when struggles are more explicit than when things are as they appear. These are broad questions, providing a context for the study of Edinburgh's trams.

Simply put, the saga of the Edinburgh trams, and the ensuing public inquiry, sheds light on systems of power and influence in the city. Drawing mainly upon inquiry evidence, we can piece together why the project was over-budget, curtailed in length, and failed to meet the original timetable. We can see how blame was apportioned by key actors. ‘The trams’ as it's come to be known as shorthand, is a ‘megaproject’, to be understood in the context of outsourcing the state, both national and local. More generally, it treats Edinburgh as an example of the ‘calculable city’, in which assets are treated as future forms of revenue rather than as public resources.

The trams saga, at the time of writing, more than two and a half years after the inquiry ended, is not yet complete, as Lord Hardie who chairs it still has to publish his report on ‘what went wrong’; the inquiry itself has cost at least £10m. However, the collection of evidence to the public inquiry –some 7 million words –came to an end over two years previously. It provides both a statement and transcript evidence from key players, and is the basis for the account here.

The chapter has three sections: first, the story of the Edinburgh trams project; second, ‘the blame game’, in which accusations flew about hither and thither; and thirdly, my analysis of why ‘the trams’ went horribly wrong. Finally, and briefly, we will return to the question of power in Edinburgh.

TRAMS: ANCIENT AND MODERN

It is useful to start with a short history of the trams project.

Edinburgh is unique among Scotland's ‘ancient’ universities in having a university founded by the city, and not by the medieval church. Created in 1583, its purpose was never clear. Historian Michael Lynch expressed this ambivalence nicely:

In this chapter I will explore the centrality of the University of Edinburgh to cultural and social life in the city. Readers might cavil at that, on the grounds that it is, these days, not the only university in the city; that there is much more to ‘enlightenment’ than the university in question, particularly in the shape of cultural and professional institutes; and that, arguably, the University of Edinburgh has played a less than fulsome part in the cultural and intellectual life of the city, certainly for one considering itself the Tounis College.

UNDERSTANDING THE TOUNIS COLLEGE

The university, through Edinburgh University Press, published an ‘illustrated history’ in 2003, written by three of its most prominent historians: Michael Lynch, who dealt with the creation of the college; Nick Phillipson, who wrote about the making of an enlightened university; and Robert Anderson, the construction of the modern university. The book is short –just over 200 pages including pictures and illustrations –and published 20 years after its tercentenary, for reasons not given in the book, but possibly because in 1983, the university was going through one of its periodic financial crises, and thought that it could not commit to spending money on something as ‘impractical’ as a history. The late Michael Moss, University of Glasgow historian, in a review in the English Historical Review, observed that:

In this chapter I will explore planning developments in Edinburgh; in the subsequent one, the case of the Edinburgh trams, the ‘big ticket’ development which, though up and running after a fashion since 2014, has been the most controversial development of them all, and still not complete seven years later. Why examine planning developments anyway? It is because systems of power are, by and large, opaque; and often it is difficult to see where power lies. Developments, however, are actions which illuminate power; they shine light on how decisions are made, and who benefits (and loses). In other words, we stand a better chance of seeing more clearly who runs things.

Edinburgh is no stranger to planning controversies, arguably more than most cities, in part because of its historical and architectural features –the council issues a Building Heights and Roofscapes Planning Guidance –but mainly because of pressures to develop in a bounded city with, at least historically, a tight green belt policy. The Abercrombie Plan of 1949 reflected those pressures, which have amplified in the subsequent half-century. We take as our marker the building of the city bypass around the city in the 1980s, which in hindsight has encouraged building up to the city limits, and beyond (see Figure 8.1, page 198).

CITY AS GROWTH MACHINE

Edinburgh is a city with many holes in the ground, none more famous than the opera-house- that- never- was in Castle Terrace until it was filled in by an office block/ theatre (The Traverse) in the 1990s. In previous chapters we have seen how planning and development have driven much of the city's politics, dominated so long by local building and property trades, shaping what the American sociologist Harvey Molotch called, memorably, the ‘growth machine’ (Molotch 1976). The political economy of place seems an apt way of understanding the social, economic and political processes which have shaped the social ecology of the city, underpinning its ecology of power relations. Not that this was unique to Edinburgh; rather, it provides a good example of a place where power and property are intimately connected. By ‘growth machine’, Molotch meant that

Let us begin our exploration of the question ‘who runs Edinburgh’ by focusing on formal political power. The point is not that this will provide an easy answer our question, but that it is the obvious place to begin. It is, as it were, necessary in finding an answer, but not sufficient. After all, power may be veiled; formal politics may (or may not) be a front for other, and deeper, interests. It is, however, one of the key games to explore in Norton Long's ecology of games.

We have three ways of assessing formal political power in Edinburgh: who runs the council (our main focus here); who gets elected as MSPs for city seats in the Scottish parliament; and who gets elected as MPs for Edinburgh constituencies at Westminster. At council level, which uses the single transferable vote system (STV), the Scottish National Party shares power with Labour in coalition, and is the senior partner with nineteen council seats following the 2017 election, to Labour's twelve. This is just short of an overall majority in a council of sixty-three members. In fact, the SNP took 27.1 per cent of the popular vote, about half a per cent behind the Conservatives, but the SNP were in a much better position to form a coalition, having been the junior partner with Labour in the previous 2012–17 administration (with eighteen seats to Labour's twenty). The Tories are less attractive coalition partners for any other party with the possible exception of the Liberal Democrats with whom they shared power back in the early 1980s in Edinburgh District.

What of ‘national’ politics? There are two levels to consider: Scottish and British. In terms of the Scottish parliament, elected by another system of proportional representation, the additional member system (AMS), the Nationalists are dominant, holding four of the six Edinburgh constituency seats in 2021, three in 2017, and five of the six in 2012. As far as Westminster seats are concerned, elected by traditional first-past- the- post, there are five Edinburgh seats; in the 2019 UK general election, three were held by the SNP, Edinburgh East, Edinburgh North and Leith, and Edinburgh South-West, all with five-figure majorities, one by Labour (Edinburgh South, also with a five-figure majority), and one by the Liberal Democrats, Edinburgh West, with a 3000 plus majority. In the latter two, non-SNP, seats, the Nationalists are the main challengers.