The 'furious dogfight' over literary festival sponsorship

Normally characterised by "white tents fluttering" in the breeze and the "swish of turning pages", this summer's book festivals have become "embroiled in a furious political dogfight", said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times.

The Hay, Edinburgh and Borders literary festivals cut ties with asset management firm Baillie Gifford after climate and anti-Israel activist group Fossil Free Books questioned the "ethics" of the sponsorship arrangements, Goldbrough wrote.

Baillie Gifford has now cancelled all of its remaining sponsorship deals with literary festivals, leaving the future of the events in doubt.

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'Rash and silly move'

The loss of Baillie Gifford's money will be "catastrophic" for British book festivals, said Goldbrough, and there is a "dawning sense" that other companies "won't exactly be queueing up to take its place".

The Scottish company is one of Britain's "best and most far-sighted investment management firms", said James Price in City A.M., and its support for book festivals has included "huge charitable efforts" aimed at improving literacy for the poorest people in Britain. That will end now, for "absolutely no gain or benefit to humanity whatsoever".

The Hay Festival has been at the "forefront of the climate change discussion and has given more time and space to the topic than any of its competitors", said Dylan Jones in the London Evening Standard. "They are the good guys here", while Fossil Free Books has "come across like a bunch of petulant teenagers".

If the activists want to "pick on someone", why choose festivals that are "world-renowned for spirited defence of free speech" and offer a "rigorous interrogation of cultural, political and environmental injustice"?

When the country's largest literary festival parts ways with its main sponsor, it's "usually a disaster for the festival", said Sam Leith in The Spectator. So this seems a "rash and silly move" because although Baillie Gifford is "not perfect", who is?

The "very many other" investment firms that are "ear-deep" in "arms companies, rare earth metals, child exploitation, fracking, seal clubbing and so forth", don't get stick because "bien pensant literary folk have never heard of them".

'Healthier future'

Author Max Porter has defended Fossil Free Books as "calm, informed and courteous". People act as if it is "trying to kill book festivals, instead of working to imagine a healthier future for them", he said.

Speaking to The Observer, Porter denounced the "bad-faith arguments, defeatism, defensiveness and rusty culture war formulations" hurled at the activist group. He insisted that its members "simply believe in the adaptation and survival of our most vital communal spaces as writers and readers, through the distancing of these spaces from financial complicity in genocide or unsustainable fossil fuel investments".

Like "any private sponsor of the arts", Baillie Gifford "doesn't lavish hundreds of thousands of pounds on these events every year out of a sense of unalloyed altruism", said Carlos Alba in The Herald. It does so "because of the image it creates, that it is not a faceless, capitalist behemoth, devoid of a cultural and intellectual hinterland".

So "in return for that, it should come as no surprise when organisations like Fossil Free Books want to kick the tires and look under the bonnet", he added.

Writing on social media, Charlotte Church, who became the public face of the campaign against Baillie Gifford, said she was "so proud of all the people in the world who are standing up for precious life and risking personal safety and reputational loss".

She added that "the courage we're seeing from activists all over the world is deeply humbling".