Opera is a very fine thing. However it is not to everybody’s taste. It seems to appeal to a very small number of people in Scotland and, it appears, that those people are mostly in the economic classes that can afford to pay for it. Opera is not going to disappear because we decide to allocate less state funding to it. Corporate sponsorship may be the way forward.
The government has an obligation to spend our tax money in ways that are most beneficial to the majority of the population. When it comes to the arts perhaps this should be in encouraging and sponsoring education of the young in multiple disciplines so that we have artists in the future?
We should be encouraging people to study and promote our heritage arts. We should be spreading the reach of the arts. We don’t need to spend our money telling people that Matisse is a good painter but perhaps we SHOULD be making people aware of artists who have come from our particular part of the world who may be lesser known.
We should be encouraging the Arts outside of the mainstream both artistically and geopgraphically.

It seems to me that Creative Scotland have got things about right with their vision which you can read about here.

http://www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/29228/Regular-Funding-2015-18-Portfolio-Overview-v1-1.pdf

I do feel MacMillan is whining because his little niche isn’t getting government money that it doesn’t need.