Waking Ned is probably the best
known in a prodigious list of movies lately
enticed to locations on the Isle of Man, shot
entirely around the village of Cregneash at
the southernmost tip of Man.. Given Ireland’s
own formidable record of seducing such unHibernian
projects as Braveheart to its
shores, the trophy is one of which the Manx
are forgivably proud. You don’t beat the
Irish at these sorts of games by accident.
It was not an accident, but a result of deliberate
policy. The Manx government is targeting the
movie industry with a single-mindedness that
is little short of awesome. This year’s
Budget saw £5m allocated to the government fund
for development of movie and programme-making,
and a further £0.2m for a multimedia centre.
Big Spenders
That doesn’t sound a lot until you lend
it some scale. The combined allocation for industrial
development and training in 2001-02 is equivalent
to £5.2m. The entire trade and industry budget
is only £15.3m. The whole of government current
spending provision this year totals £54m. In
a jurisdiction of just 75,000 souls, £5.2m is
big, big money.
Here’s how it works. UK or Manx-based film
and television producers can look to the Manx
government for a whopping 25% of project budget
in loans or equity, without upper limit, plus
up to £240,000 in production credits.
In return, they must film at least half the
production on the island, and show willing to
spend a fifth of below-line budget with local
services. An exhaustive directory, running from
post-production to pizza deliveries, is provided,
as is elaborate help with locations and procedures.
Shames Scottish Attempts
It reflects a coherent, and cohered-to, films
strategy that puts to shame Scotland’s
protracted attempts to find common ground on
what facilities are needed, who should run them,
how to mesh them with a creative industries
‘cluster’, and whether they should
be in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Not for the Manx
a Scottish Screen and a Connery, rubbishing
each other’s studio plans while Inverness,
Dundee and Achnashoogle plead for their due
scraps of the action.
The context is a Manx economy which, measured
by GDP-per-head, recently overtook Britain’s
for the first time. With corporation tax and
income tax both at 12% basic and 18% higher-rate,
a thriving financial sector comes as no surprise.
But the old caricature of a shady offshore redoubt
is resented, and with good reason. This is an
economy transformed, like Ireland’s, by
clear vision consistently applied.
Small states can achieve big things in the new
economy, provided they set their minds to it.
It is time that Scotland learned the trick.
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