A wave of activist-led boycotts is silencing cultural events and stifling artistic expression, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has warned, condemning what she called a “moral puritanism” sweeping through the arts.
Delivering the inaugural Jennie Lee Lecture, in memory of Harold Wilson’s arts minister, Nandy took aim at the growing trend of authors and activists withdrawing from literary festivals over the perceived political or national ties of corporate sponsors. She described the practice as “self-defeating virtue signalling” that risked “gagging society”.
“The protest against any and every sponsor of the arts, I believe, would have made [Lee] angered and ashamed,” Nandy said.
Nandy also made a broader case for artistic and cultural pluralism, arguing that “[t]oo much of our rich inheritance, heritage, and culture is not seen… and when it is not, not only is the whole nation poorer, but the country suffers”.
Quoting from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, she evoked the need to rediscover “the roar that lies on the other side of silence”. What Britain needs, she said, “is a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life. We’ve got to be able to hear it.”
Her remarks come amid growing unease over the puritanical attitudes of a small but vocal activist minority towards private funding of the arts, a tension that has been particularly acute in the publishing and literary sectors, where political boycotts have escalated.
In October 2024, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) wrote to the Publishers Association warning of the legal and reputational risks of participating in a “discriminatory and illegal” boycott of Israeli publishers and cultural institutions. The intervention came after a coalition of writers and literary professionals issued an open letter calling for a boycott of Israeli publishers, book festivals, literary agencies, and publications that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, by operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.
The letter stated that the boycott would also extend to organisations that had never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”
Organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature (PLF), alongside groups such as Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and Fossil Free Books, the letter attracted more than 5,000 signatories from across the literary world.
Some activists contend that even remaining neutral on Israel’s military actions is politically problematic. Speaking to the Times, Omar Robert Hamilton, the author who co-founded PLF, said that “passive silence” from organisations – i.e., not speaking out against Israel’s military – is also a form of “complicity”.
The row over literary boycotts targeting Israel intensified just months after UK literary festivals dropped a major corporate sponsor over its alleged investments in companies linked to the country.
Both the Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival cut ties with Baillie Gifford after pro-Palestine activists accused the investment firm of having links to Israel.
Under pressure from campaigners – and with some authors threatening to withdraw from events – Baillie Gifford subsequently pulled its sponsorship from eight other literary festivals, including those in Cheltenham, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Wigtown. The move raised concerns about the financial sustainability of Britain’s festival circuit, with organisers warning that such pressures could jeopardise cultural events that rely on private funding.
“I have spent enough time at Hay and Glastonbury to know that these are the spaces, the only spaces, where precisely the moral voice and protest comes from,” Nandy said during her speech. “Boycotting sponsors and killing these events off is the equivalent of gagging society.
“This self-defeating virtue signalling is a feature of our times, and we will stand against it with everything we have got.”
The trend of activist-led cultural boycotts has divided opinion within Labour ranks. Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and other Labour figures publicly withdrew from the Hay Festival over its Baillie Gifford sponsorship, aligning themselves with campaigners who argue that corporate funding compromises artistic independence.
According to Nandy, however, the erosion of sponsorship threatens the very cultural infrastructure on which artists and audiences rely.
Whether the Culture Secretary’s intervention signals a genuine government commitment to resisting ideological purity tests in the arts, or simply an electorally convenient rhetorical distancing from Labour’s activist wing, remains to be seen.
