The Festival of Politics - Where Politics Meets the People

The widely acclaimed, award winning Festival of Politics is a ground breaking and innovative Festival that combines the worlds of politics, media and the arts. Growing in strength over the past 5 years the Festival has played host to a selection of inspiring presentations, speeches and debates from a cast of famous faces including political icons, campaigners and journalists.

The Festival offers a great number of events, broadening the opportunity to discover that politics is for everyone.

During the Festival of Politics, the Parliament also plays host to the world’s premier photojournalism showcase – the World Press Photo exhibition, featuring winning photographs from the World Press Photo competition. To tie in with the exhibition, The Festival programme frequently features discussions and presentations from leading photojournalists.

The Festival has grown in popularity year on year, with more than 114,000 people attending Festival of Politics events and the World Press Photo Exhibition in the past 4 years.

Partnership is key to the success of the Festival and the Parliament works in partnership with a diverse range of organisations to deliver the Festival. The Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) has developed a very clear and rigorous policy to ensure that sponsorship, which does involve business and commerce, is separated from the functions related to parliamentary business. It is important to the Parliament that any sponsorship agreement must not influence, or appear to influence, our main activities.

The Parliament accepts sponsorship in support of specific public events, projects and activities. The Festival of Politics and the World Press Photo Exhibition are two projects for which sponsorship is accepted. In return for their support, the Parliament typically offers the sponsor acknowledgement of its support within Festival marketing materials such, as the Festival printed programme and website, as well as invitations to any pre-launch or launch receptions, and relevant events within the programme.

If you are interested in sponsoring the Festival of Politics or World Press Photo Exhibition, please contact our Procurement team 0131 348 6655.

The sponsorship helps the Parliament to offset the cost of delivering the Festival. For example, the direct costs to the SPCB of producing this year’s Festival of Politics is estimated, once projected income from ticket sales and sponsorship has been taken into account to be between £45,000 and £50,000.

This year’s Festival of Politics involves 45 events over seven days. This has increased from the first Festival when 22 events took place over three days.