Book festivals always make me a tad nervous. There is something rather indecent about meeting one’s favourite authors, especially the novelists.
I spend much of my life writing about, talking about and teaching other people’s books. But the most important thing you can do with a book is read it. The experience of reading, even when we read aloud with others, is an intimate exchange between reader and writer. How can any of us turn that private traffic of the written word into public conversation?
A few months ago, I met a novelist whose words had transformed my inner life. There he was, dropping crumbs in the green room and bitching about how his agent had screwed up the sale of a TV adaptation. I could only stutter.
Nonetheless, plenty of people do love book festivals. The phenomenon has boomed in the last decade: the Hay Festival in Wales claims to attract nearly 300,000 people each year. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of watching younger readers, less jaded than I, meeting real life authors for the first time.
Now, a group wants to take that access to literary culture away from the country’s readers. Much of the UK’s literary sector is sponsored by the investment fund Baillie Gifford, whose philanthropic projects include the prestigious non-fiction prize formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize. Last year’s Edinburgh Books Festival was overshadowed by a row after one hundred authors – sorry, “literary industry workers”, as they termed themselves – signed a letter demanding that the festival end its sponsorship arrangement with Baillie Gifford or face a mass boycott in 2024.
“Fossil Free Books”, the organisation linked to this action, last week scored its first major victory when the Hay Festival, also sponsored by Baillie Gifford, capitulated to its demands to cut ties. After the singer Charlotte Church became the latest figure to pull out at short notice, Hay hurriedly announced that it was “suspending” Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship.
What’s the matter with Baillie Gifford? As per the protest group’s official name, the original objection was the investment fund’s holdings in energy companies, some of which still trade in fossil fuels. Or so the story was a year ago. Spend any time looking at this group, and it becomes clear the objection is to 21st-century capitalism in all its forms. Their success in coercing Hay Festival risks establishing a purity test that no commercial sponsor is ever likely to meet.
The traction now achieved by Fossil Free Books, and thus the crisis engulfing the world of literary festivals, is predicated upon a lack of knowledge in the books sector about what investment funds do and the rules by which they must abide.
Baillie Gifford is a company that invests other people’s money, often for pension funds. Investment managers are not allowed to divest their clients’ money according to their own ethical preferences – they have a fiduciary duty to pursue the best financial outcome for their clients, unless clients instruct otherwise. They are also subject to complex rules about spreading the risk for their clients, which usually means they’re obliged to spread the investment over a range of different industries and asset classes.
In practice, that means it’s hard to run a pension fund without investing somewhere in essential utilities sectors – because as long as your clients are alive, there will be utilities companies.
Despite all this, Baillie Gifford has one of the lowest rates of investment in fossil fuels of any fund. Only two per cent of its clients’ money is invested in companies which have any business related to fossil fuels. That compares to the market average of 11 per cent.
If you want to function as a financial entity within the rules governing the British financial sector, it’s hard to imagine an investment strategy less exposed to fossil fuels. It strongly suggests that the fundamental goal of Fossil Free Books is precisely that – a books world that rejects the rules of capitalism at all.
It made no mention of the Palestinian cause in the campaign against Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of the 2023 Edinburgh Festival – the primary goal is, after all, in the name “Fossil Free Books” – but in recent months has rebranded to focus on Baillie Gifford’s tenuous connections to global technologies companies which work with Israel. (One is Meta. That hasn’t stopped Fossil Free Books running an Instagram and a Facebook page.)
This abrupt shift to harness topical political winds has led to some unsavoury public positions. In a FAQ released to promote its recent motion at the Society of Authors, calling for “divestment” across the book industry, the organisation equated the seizure of Israeli hostages on 7 October with Israel’s prison system and the incarceration of Palestinians convicted for crimes.
There is much that is wrong with Israeli treatment of Palestinians in its courts, but to equate a nation’s formal justice system with the kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas – whose fighters were seen on film only this week describing female hostages as “Sabaya”, or Isis-style sex-slaves – is not the rhetoric of reasonable people. No one who plays such rhetorical games with real people’s lives should be dictating the culture of Britain’s literary life.
But Fossil Free Books is a lesson in luxury politics. Access to culture remains acutely limited by privilege and class. Scrolling through its signatories, I couldn’t help but notice the names of many acquaintances who have benefited from private educations and from wealth built in polluting industries. (So did I, but I have never been a hypocrite about it.)
It is hypocrisy of the highest order when those who have benefited from entry points to an industry shut those doors behind them and reassure themselves of their own virtue by reciting the correct Marxist phrases. God forbid a young reader who lacks capitalist parents of her own should let an investment fund sponsor her first experience of the literary world. That appears to be the purview of the existing literati.
In an era when newspapers and legacy media have radically cut down their books pages, festivals have filled that gap, becoming the industry’s key platform for promoting new books. Including Hay, Baillie Gifford sponsors 11 of those festivals. Casting it out as a pariah sponsor would have a devastating impact on this country’s literary landscape.
Hay has become so big and popular that it is a particularly vulnerable target to this kind of pressure campaign – few other literary festivals would be devastated by the boycott of Charlotte Church. In capitulating to the wreckers, however, it has legitimised a purity test that no one in British literature can pass.