Growing sponsorship row leaves UK summer arts festivals in turmoil

It is the sort of discussion that literary festivals pride themselves on being able to hold in a nuanced, civilised manner: are certain corporations ethical enough to sponsor the arts?

Yet the debate over the role of Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm, in several of the UK’s leading festivals has spiralled into a national row far too large to be contained inside a marquee.

On Monday, Baillie Gifford will start meeting leaders of festivals to discuss the future of the firm’s sponsorship, after two of its beneficiaries – the Hay festival and Edinburgh international book festival – decided last week they could no longer accept its money, following a campaign by some authors and others in the book industry.

The campaign by Fossil Free Books (FFB), an activist collective of more than 800 authors and publishing workers, has focused on billions of pounds of investments that the Edinburgh-based firm holds in companies linked to the fossil fuel industry and to Israel. Among some of the seven festivals that remain sponsored by Baillie Gifford, there is fear that the financiers will conclude their involvement is no longer good for either them or the festivals.

It would leave a substantial hole in the budgets of organisations that have survived the pandemic and cost of living crisis partly because of corporate sponsorship.

Baillie Gifford says it can only make investments on its clients’ instructions, and that only 2% of its clients’ money is invested in business related to fossil fuels, compared with the market average of 11%. It also said demands that it divest from large technology companies, including Amazon and Meta, Airbnb and Booking.com, were “unreasonable … much as it would be unreasonable to demand authors boycott Instagram or stop selling books on Amazon.”

Toby Mundy, a leading literary agent and director of the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, said: “We’re proud of our association with Baillie Gifford, who have … contributed enormously to a free and open and plural literary culture in the UK. Our board is more than satisfied that Baillie Gifford is a force for good and is contributing positively to the post-carbon transition.

“I think the campaign is well intentioned, but ultimately it’s destructive and counterproductive because it gravely jeopardises a fragile ecosystem that has taken decades to build. And there are no obvious alternative supporters waiting in the wings … Were [Baillie Gifford] to withdraw, which I hope very much that they won’t, all these activities would be put in grave danger.”

Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, defended FFB as “calm, informed and courteous”, saying: “People act as if FFB are trying to kill book festivals, instead of working to imagine a healthier future for them. The array of bad-faith arguments, defeatism, defensiveness and rusty culture war formulations thrown at FFB online has been alarming.

“[They] 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. If that is such a death blow to the festival model then we must all work together to create a new one.”

The FFB campaign was formed after Greta Thunberg pulled out of the Edinburgh books festival in August last year, accusing Baillie Gifford of “greenwashing”, with authors calling on the firm to divest from fossil fuels.

After the Hamas terror attacks on 7 October and Israel’s attacks in Gaza, the group joined calls from Art Workers for Palestine Scotland to divest from all companies linked to Israeli cybersecurity, including Meta and Amazon.

FFB issued a letter shortly before the start of the Hay festival on 23 May, and by Friday afternoon the organisers had announced they were suspending their relationship with Baillie Gifford. Charlotte Church, the singer, Nish Kumar, the comedian, and Labour politicians Shami Chakrabarti and Dawn Butler had all cancelled plans to speak.

It is understood that as many as 30 speakers told the festival they would pull out, threatening the viability of the event, after receiving an email from FFB saying that there would be pro-Palestinian protesters at the event.

“These groups as a whole won’t be able to come into your events without buying tickets, but they might have associates or friends attending Hay, who they can make aware to give support to you,” the email said. “They’ve also said they would try to offer support at the entry to your event if they are given details of when and where it’s happening.”

Some authors interpreted this as an implicit threat, it is understood. When the Edinburgh international book festival dropped Baillie Gifford last week, its director Jenny Niven said that “pressure on our team has become intolerable”. The festival’s chair, Allan Little, said the team could not deliver a “safe and sustainable” festival with the “constant threat of disruption from activists”.

Joan Smith, the author of What Will Survive, was not one of those authors, but she said: “This is, in some way, a weaponisation of shame, because if you aren’t seen to be publicly supporting the protests then you are made to feel like a bad person.”

FFB rejected the claim that its emails seemed threatening. Yara Rodrigues Fowler, one of the organisers, said: “We always made it very clear that authors were entirely free to make their own decisions and that ignoring our call to action would not burn any bridges. We have never recommended any action targeting authors and we have never attempted to pressure any authors that haven’t signed our statement.”

Many of the authors involved in FFB, such as Grace Blakeley, are upset at how the campaign has been characterised. Polly Atkin, a poet and bookseller who spoke at Hay, supports FFB and read a work by the Gaza poet Haidar al-Ghazali before her event. “There is a false premise that Baillie Gifford money is the only way to fund a festival. It’s a panic response. I used to run a programme at Kendal Mountain festival that we couldn’t get sponsorship for. It was a tiny amount of money but we lost the sponsorship and had to stop. I know exactly what it’s like – it’s terrible. But I don’t think the only way to make a festival run is to take money from investment companies.”

Scottish writers, including Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Alexander McCall Smith and Jenny Colgan, and the poet Liz Lochhead, wrote an open letter to the Scotsman last week, saying they also called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and for the release of hostages but that they were “profoundly concerned about the fate of the UK’s book festivals and other cultural events” in light of the protests.

Adrian Turpin, creative and strategic director of the Wigtown festival in Dumfries and Galloway, which is sponsored by Baillie Gifford, said: “We are in danger of getting to a position where millions of pounds over the next decade is just going to be removed from the arts and culture.

“I think if we really felt that this was going to change anything, this direct action against soft-target book festivals, then maybe that would be justifiable. But I don’t this will have any effect.

“I’m exceptionally gloomy about what this is going to mean. I’ve heard people say ‘we need to have a discussion about new models for funding these things’ … I don’t know what these new models are. It feels like a mentality of ‘burn the whole world down and it’s your problem making sure that it works’.”