As a self-styled witch, Dr Alice Tarbuck offers online Tarot card readings for £50 an hour and courses in how to embrace the ‘magic’ in everyday life.
Her freelance lessons run throughout the year and are described as ‘perfect for anyone with an interest in the history, ethics and practice of witchcraft’.
But the rest of the time the author and poet has another role – as a ‘literature officer’ for controversial arts quango Creative Scotland, currently at the centre of a political firestorm.
It is supposed to support artists by doling out large sums of public money but recently closed a vital fund, sparking a backlash from the artistic community – outraged at what they saw as their betrayal by fat-cat bureaucrats on six-figure salaries.
Whether Dr Tarbuck, with her Tarot and witchcraft skills, saw this row coming is unknown – but we can reveal that she was disciplined by her well-remunerated superiors for using some dark arts of her own.
Her role was to provide backing for writers as part of Creative Scotland’s mission to help people and organisations to ‘make work of quality and ambition that enriches life in Scotland for everyone’.
But Dr Tarbuck used her position for a very different purpose – an attempt to suppress a ‘gender-critical’ book, which raised concern about radical trans rights activism, and which she deemed to be transphobic – more of which later.
She contacted at least one bookshop and asked its managers not to stock the title – Hounded: Women, Harms and The Gender Wars, by Jenny Lindsay – which ‘charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights’.
Ms Lindsay was alerted to Dr Tarbuck’s intervention and made a formal complaint against the literature officer – who says she enjoys ‘getting to be hands-on, helping to make authors’ work the best it could be’.
It’s not every quango that can boast a witch on the payroll – one who wrote a poem called Satanic Transformations, re-envisaging Barbie as a ‘gay boy’ (available on YouTube) – but then Creative Scotland is a quango like no other.
Last week the public body – led by an executive team on combined salaries of nearly £1million – announced it had made the difficult decision to close its Open Fund for Individuals to new applications ‘due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm release of £6.6million in grant-in-aid budget in the current financial year, 2024-25’.
The fund is a lifeline for emerging talent and pays for a ‘wide range of activity initiated by artists, writers, producers and other creative practitioners in Scotland’.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. It came during the final days of the Edinburgh Festival, giving performers the chance to use final curtain calls to launch a bitter attack on the funding cuts.
A further 2,000 ‘deeply concerned’ artists and arts workers signed an open letter criticising ministers for a decision that puts the ‘future of the arts at risk’, by failing to support the freelancers who form a large part of the workforce.
This week, heavyweights on the pop scene including Biffy Clyro, Paolo Nutini, Franz Ferdinand, The Proclaimers, Karine Polwart and Mogwai joined forces to demand ‘immediate reinstatement’ of the Open Fund to head off a ‘cultural crisis’.
Culture Secretary Angus Robertson and his colleagues are angry that disaster-prone Creative Scotland is mired in yet another funding controversy, though their government has political oversight of it and seems to have turned a blind eye to previous scandals rather than intervening to prevent them.
The backlash over the major funding cutbacks has refocused attention on one of Scotland’s most loathed and certainly most dysfunctional quangos (and it is a tightly contested field).
Back in March, the organisation – which is in charge of a £96million budget – was at the centre of a separate row over a decision to use taxpayers’ money to fund an explicit sex project.
Chief executive Iain Munro later told MSPs that Creative Scotland had withdrawn funding after a public outcry – but admitted it had failed to recover all of the nearly £85,000 paid to the film-maker behind the project.
It was described as a ‘fantastical’ 45-minute art installation performed by a mix of dancers, sex workers and performers who would take the audience on an ‘erotic journey through a distinctly Scottish landscape’.
A recruitment advert for the project – called Rein – stated that actors must be over the age of 18 and have ‘experience of sex work, particularly in porn contexts’.
Participants were to be paid £270 a day to take part in a secret sex party in a cave, as part of an ‘exploration of lesbian and queer sexuality set in the Scottish landscape’.
And yet Creative Scotland’s formidable team failed to spot that it was funding something which Mr Munro euphemistically described as a ‘challenging piece of experimental performance art’.
Some 147 people work for the organisation, including four in the public relations department plus the 24-strong board and ‘senior leadership team’ headed by Mr Munro, who is on a salary of £125,000-£130,000 with a pension pot worth £470,000.
Their job is to help artists such as Ms Lindsay, the writer who penned the book that sparked such a visceral reaction from Dr Tarbuck.
Ms Lindsay is exactly the sort of artist Creative Scotland was set up to help – and she needed all the support she could get.
Five years after trans rights activists led a hate campaign that destroyed her livelihood, the poet had fought back with a new book on the ‘hounding’ phenomenon.
Ms Lindsay wrote in the Mail last year about her ordeal, which began after she objected to a call from a male writer for ‘violent action’ against lesbians at a Pride march.
She announced this July that Hounded would be published in October. Two days later, Dr Tarbuck contacted at least one bookshop to demand that they refuse to stock it.
Ms Lindsay has learned to be stoical but admits she ‘wasn’t prepared for someone with serious gatekeeping power using her position to attempt to undermine both my ability to forge a new partnership with independent bookstores, and for this to be treated as in any way a normal thing to do for any writer, never mind one in Tarbuck’s position’.
The Mail has been told that two years ago, when on a temporary contract, Dr Tarbuck was spoken to by her superiors about the tone of some of her social media posts – but she was later made a permanent member of Creative Scotland staff on a part-time basis.
Asked about the claim, the quango said only that it provides ‘guidance on social media use to all our staff’ and discusses this with ‘individual staff members as required’. Dr Tarbuck has so far declined to comment.
One leading Scottish novelist, who asked not to be named, said the Tarbuck episode summed up wider problems besetting a quango with a long history of tension with the artistic community it is supposed to serve.
The writer accused Creative Scotland of ‘covering the back of a member of staff who tried to wreck a writer’s career’.
Backing up those concerns, a publishing industry source said: ‘After everything that happened to Jenny Lindsay, you’d think these people would have learned their lessons.
‘The arts establishment is gripped by trans rights activists and bitter wannabes.’
A Creative Scotland spokesman said: ‘We received a complaint regarding a member of staff and this complaint was investigated in line with our published complaints handling procedure, and our internal HR processes.
The outcome of this process led to appropriate action being taken.
‘In line with employment law, that action is confidential. The complainant has informed us in writing that they were content with the process.’
But Ms Lindsay insists that she did not know the outcome until the Mail informed her.
Creative Scotland refused to say whether Dr Tarbuck had tried to pressure any other bookshops into boycotting Ms Lindsay’s book.
Earlier this month, it emerged that an influential arts charity which told bookshops not to sell titles written by gender-critical authors had secured Creative Scotland funding.
The quango awarded a grant worth more than £64,300 to Literature Alliance Scotland (LAS).
LAS, Scotland’s largest literary network, was thrown into turmoil after a statement was posted on its website claiming ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – a derogatory term for those who do not believe that trans women are women – were in league with fascists and calling on venues not to offer them a public platform.
It provoked a backlash from campaign groups including For Women Scotland, a women’s rights group, which said: ‘What will be next? Book burnings? This is madness.’
Creative Scotland said LAS had ‘received £64,344 in the latest round of Open Fund awards for “Creating a Fairer Sector”, supporting Scottish writers and the literature workforce’.
LAS admitted a ‘significant failure’ and said its board chairman, Sarah Mason, had stepped down.
One Creative Scotland insider claimed it was too closely aligned with a ‘network of furious activists who think everything is about gender ideology’, adding: ‘Writers see the way people who speak up for women’s rights are destroyed and they’re scared into silence.’
That network appears to stretch beyond the confines of the quango – and raises serious questions over the way in which funding applications are decided.
Dramatist David Greig, artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, was awaiting the outcome of one such application when arts worker Dr Rosie Aspinall Priest began firing off a series of tweets attacking him over his alleged support for transphobic views.
Mr Greig had used his personal Twitter account to ‘like’ statements by the feminist campaigner and journalist Julie Bindel.
One tweet posted by Ms Bindel read: ‘Lads and lasses in the trenches fighting the gender madness – what is the best (very recent) example you can think of that shows how we have won this crazy war?’
‘I wonder,’ wrote Dr Aspinall Priest on August 16, 2023, ‘how Lyceum theatre staff, audiences and partner organisations feel about [its] artistic director [Mr Greig] openly liking transphobic tweets? Really awful things on display here that do not align with the values inherent within Scotland’s theatre sector.’
Her remarks might easily have been brushed off had it not been for the fact that one of the senior officials deciding the merit of Mr Greig’s application was her civil partner, Paul Burns, who earns £55,000-£60,000 as interim director of arts at Creative Scotland.
In an internal email to staff, Mr Greig apologised for his ‘careless and harmful’ tweets and closed his social media accounts. He is now serving notice after stepping down from his role, though many in the arts world believe he should not have had to apologise.
Dr Aspinall Priest (pronouns ‘they/them’), who found Brexit ‘terrifying’ and has condemned ‘horrible, radical, Right-wing’ politics, was approached for comment.
While Mr Burns certainly can’t be held responsible for his partner’s public statements, the relationship has caused consternation in the arts world and within government. One Scottish Government civil service insider said: ‘Say the NHS opened a bid for a new drug supplier and the partner of the person granting the contract spent the tendering process smearing one of the companies, saying their drugs were rubbish and then hounding the boss. That would be a huge scandal.’
Last night, a Creative Scotland spokesman said: ‘We are not responsible for, nor do we comment on, the actions of any staff members’ partners, family members or friends.’
She added: ‘No one individual is responsible for decisions to award funding from Creative Scotland, and decision-making processes include a range of checks and balances, in line with our governance framework.’
Meanwhile, furious ministers are understood to believe that the quango should have dipped into its own considerable reserves rather than cutting funds for artists.
But Creative Scotland insists it is ‘restricted through legislation as regards what these reserves can be used for’.
A spokesman said: ‘National Lottery reserves (of which we currently hold £11million and which are fully allocated to support the forthcoming multi-year funding programme) cannot be used to substitute for cuts we receive in our grant-in-aid budget from Scottish Government’.
While it suits the SNP to pass the buck to the quango’s leadership, it is clear to many critics that ministers have been asleep at the wheel as the organisation careered out of control.
Born in 2010 out of the merger of the Scottish Arts Council and the ever-troubled Scottish Screen, Creative Scotland was originally the brainchild of the old Labour/Lib Dem Scottish Executive.
Under the Nationalists, it became a vehicle for promoting a ‘modern, vibrant and progressive’ Scotland at home and abroad.
Yet two years later, there was a backlash after the body announced a shift from providing ‘core funding’ for festivals and theatre troupes to financing individual projects, requiring greater competition between artists for grants.
In 2012, 100 leading artistic figures, including Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead and Ian Rankin, penned an open letter savaging the quango’s ‘ill-conceived decision- making’ and a ‘lack of empathy and regard for Scottish culture’.
More than a decade on, Creative Scotland remains in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, but this time it seems that its political masters are fast losing patience with its bosses – and it may take more than witchcraft to steer it out of its current crisis.