Irvine Welsh has blasted a decision to close a museum dedicated to working class life in his home city.
The Trainspotting author hit out at the Labour administration on City of Edinburgh Council after it temporarily closed the People’s Story.
The venue on the Canongate was shut with no warning last month as councillors try to deal with a £26m overspend in the local authority’s budget.
The decision prompted outrage from locals and has led to the launch of the Save the People’s Story campaign, which described the museum as a “vital part of this city’s social fabric”.
It has so far been backed by more than 100 academics and the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC).
Welsh, a former council worker, lent his support on social media today and claimed the closure was another example of “all references to social class have to be airbrushed out of popular discourse”.
“I worked for Edinburgh Council when this museum opened,” the Leith-born author posted on X. “The feeling amongst councillors from working class areas of the city was that we represented monarchs, aristocrats and the warlords of slavery and imperialism enough in our civic culture, it might be an idea to represent local people too.
“Back then the Labour administration were proud to represent working class people in Edinburgh. This is obviously no longer the case. 40 years of neoliberalism means all references to social class have to be airbrushed out of popular discourse and officials see their role as representing global capital in a race to the bottom, involving more wealth for the already super-rich and precarious low-paid McJobs for everyone else.
The lunacy of this is that nobody with any semblance of intelligence knows that this is going to end well. Yet we persist with it. If you want to build luxury hotels in city centre properties, start with Holyrood palace.”
Councillors have insisted the closure is temporary and blamed “staffing pressures” for the decision to lock the doors at the historic building on the Canongate.
But no fixed date has been given for its reopening amid fears the museum could close permanently due to wider cutbacks to public services.
Val Walker, culture and communities convener, told a meeting of the council last week: “The administration wants the People’s Story to re-open but we recognise that there are challenges, hurdles to overcome. We cannot just re-open it tomorrow. There are not the staff to have every museum open.
“That is an absolute commitment from me that at the December committee meeting we will be looking at the ways in which we can re-open that museum – not in April but in December.”
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