This week, the Edinburgh Book Festival has joined the Hay Literary Festival in abandoning its sponsorship deal with the investment group Baillie Gifford, due to the firm’s investments in the oil industry and its supposed links to the war in Gaza.
The decision to ditch Baillie Gifford comes after a campaign by Fossil Free Books, whose leading organisers include the ‘anarchist gardener’ Ellen Miles.
I know literary folk love to say they’re writers not fighters but you might’ve thought they would have shown a little more courage defending free speech
The chair of Edinburgh Book Festival, the BBC TV journalist Allan Little, explained that:
‘Our team cannot be expected to deliver a safe and sustainable festival this August under the constant threat of disruption from activists. This was a pragmatic response to that reality.’
I’m not quite sure what he was afraid of – perhaps being pelted with begonias? If the Festival was really worried they could have always asked the police to help out with some anarchist weeding.
I know literary folk love to say they’re writers not fighters but you might’ve thought they would have shown a little more courage in defending free speech and discussion in what has become an important fixture in the public square.
Wasn’t it Bill Clinton who called Hay ‘the Woodstock of the mind’? Now the future of the Edinburgh Festival, which used to claim to be the biggest book festival in the world, is in jeopardy. What company in its right mind would step in with a seven figure sum to save the event? Who would risk the reputational damage of being defamed by brain dead climate activists?
The real reason for this latest pusillanimous capitulation to eco-zealotry is the threat that authors will pull out of the festival. I’m not sure why the organisers are so concerned though about losing a few celebs. Hay lost its literary bottle after a boycott by literary superstars like, er, the singer Charlotte Church and comedian Nish Kumar – plus politicians of the calibre of Dawn Butler. Does it really need them?
I used to appear regularly as both an author and a chair at the Edinburgh Book Festival from 2001 to 2016 until I got fed up appearing on the same sycophantic panels. Back then it was sponsored by – wait for it – Royal Bank of Scotland, the bank most responsible for the 2010 financial crash. RBS then had tens of billions invested in fossil fuels. Curiously, environmentalists like George Monbiot, who I often chatted with in the author’s yurt, seemed to have no difficulty appearing in those days.
Baillie Gifford has only 2 per cent of its funds in fossil energy-related investments and vastly more in companies promoting the transition to green energy. It would be hard to find any investment house of any size in the world that does not have investments ‘linked’ to oils and gas. Fossil Free Books don’t dispute this – but they still insist on their reckless iconoclasm.
Fossil Free Books has added involvement in the ‘genocide in Gaza’ to the charge sheet against Baillie Gifford this year. This is apparently because of Baillie Gifford’s links to Israel through its investments in technology behemoths like Amazon, NVIDIA and Meta. One wonders whether the anarchist gardeners ever order seeds from Amazon or spend any time on Facebook. If so, I’m sure they will be divesting in themselves with immediate effect.
This is one of those weird self-destructive passions to which literary world is sadly prone. Apparently 700 hundred authors and comics – including Frankie Boyle, who used to ridicule people with disabilities – have signed a letter calling for Baillie Gifford to divest from the fossil fuel industry and Israel-based companies. This philistinism will make precisely zero difference to climate change. But it presumably makes these middle-class militants feel good.
Baillie Gifford – which promotes a string of literary festivals – is widely regarded as one of the best arts sponsors around, not least because it is liberal, open-minded and gives large sums of money with no strings attached. The organisers of literary festivals are only creating a rod for their own backs by pandering to this juvenile eco-activism against the company. The organisers should remember that people will always find some reason to stage a boycott.
After all, the Edinburgh Book Festival, like its parent the Edinburgh International Festival, receives large sums of money from the Scottish government. This is the same SNP administration that has just abandoned its own legally-binding greenhouse gas emissions targets, sacked Green party ministers and is calling for the windfall tax on the oil and gas industry to be cut. Perhaps soon there will be calls for events to stop taking money from the Scottish government, via Creative Scotland?
That could end up being a truly popular cause. I suspect the vast majority of voters could think of more worthwhile uses for their money than it being spent on events that precious few of them ever attend.
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