Investment fund Baillie Gifford has cancelled its remaining sponsorship deals with literary festivals around the UK following protests over its purported links to Israel and fossil fuel companies.
The move comes after mounting pressure from the campaign group Fossil Free Books (FFB), which has called on the company to cease its investments in the fossil fuel industry and also demanded it divest from companies linked to Israel, as it believes “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”.
More than 200 leading writers and authors, including Naomi Klein, Sally Rooney, Natalie Diaz and Robert Macfarlane recently signed an open letter organised by FFB, calling on Baillie Gifford to divest from fossil fuels and cease its links to Israel.
Last month, the Hay festival organisers took the decision themselves to end Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship, with Chief Executive Julie Finch saying that it wanted to guarantee “freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate”. The Edinburgh international book festival organisers and the asset manager “collectively agreed” to terminate their sponsorship deal, after festival director Jenny Niven had spoken of the “intolerable pressure” on her staff.
In an editorial, the Observer has questioned how much longer book literary festivals will survive, at least in their present form, if this is the new threshold for boycott and divestment action.
“Baillie Gifford’s precise sins are hard to fathom,” they say. “While FFB claims that the firm is implicated in ‘fossil fuels, genocide and colonial violence’, its links to Israel seem only to comprise small investments in multinational companies such as Amazon and Meta, while only 2% of its overall portfolio is in fossil fuels (it invests far more in green energy).
“But the bigger problem now lies with the future. Other potential sponsors – assuming they exist, which is moot, if one considers funding for the arts overall – are bound to ask themselves: does the business exist that is good enough – pure enough – for these campaigners? Big, democratic festivals are going to shrink, others may wither on the vine, and we will all be the poorer for it, including those writers whose threatened boycotts of some festivals precipitated Baillie Gifford’s exit.
“The UK’s book festivals are part of an extremely fragile ecosystem. It has taken decades of hard work on the part of their organisers, as well as armies of local volunteers, to get them to where they are now, popular and vibrant.
“In an age of austerity, cuts and social fragmentation, their contribution to literacy and good mental health is increasingly significant. In a society where soft censorship is rife and free-thinking often shouted down, they provide a forum in which it’s possible to debate and disseminate difficult, controversial ideas.
But if they’re important to their communities, their value to writers, and therefore to literature itself, is also crucial. Only a very few authors can afford to turn down an invitation to a festival, should they be lucky enough to get one. Sales of books, and of literary novels in particular, are vanishingly small; a couple of thousand copies sold will get you on the bestseller list. Most writers struggle to make a living.
“Don’t we know by now that what we lose, we never get back? Since 2010, almost 800 libraries have closed their doors, a fifth of the total. They sit, sad and empty, awaiting an offer from a hotel chain or developer.
“Whatever their original intentions, the activists and celebrity supporters of FFB are in effect campaigning against both charitable organisations that do only good work in this country, and the life of its mind. They should be careful what they wish for.”
