Mick Hartley

Last year the Edinburgh International Book Festival was persuaded by a group of activists calling themselves “Fossil Free Books” to drop their connection to their main sponsors, the investment company Baillie Gifford. Vague connections to petrochemical companies were mentioned – in fact a tiny proportion of Baillie Gifford's investments – as was, of course, Israel. Celebrities like Sally Rooney, Frankie Boyle, Amy Liptrot, Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, and – ooh – Nish Kumar and Charlotte Church, signed a letter backing the Baillie Gifford ban. Amazon, it was pointed out by critics, would have made a much stronger target for censure in terms of fossil fuels/Israel but that would have hurt these authors' sales, so better to stick with some posh-sounding investment company for a bit of pain-free virtue-signaling.

So this year, oh dear, they're a bit short of cash. Alex Massie in the Times – Edinburgh book festival is victim of its own anti-capitalist stupidity:

It does not matter that Baillie Gifford has almost no exposure to fossil fuels or, indeed, Israel, the ostensible justifications for the protests. The firm exists to make life more comfortable for current and future pensioners. It is an unabashedly capitalist enterprise. That is its real crime and by sympathising with and then acceding to demands made by radical nincompoops the Edinburgh Book Festival sent a message to all other would-be sponsors: we are not so very interested in your money.

Unsurprisingly, other firms have absorbed this message. As a result, Scotland’s largest book festival has almost no significant private sector sponsors this year. Digby Brown, the Edinburgh law firm, is the only such backer in 2025 and its support is limited to sponsoring a handful of events. The rest of the festival’s funding comes from public bodies, various foundations and trusts, the People’s Postcode Lottery and, generously, Sir Ian Rankin.

Book festivals across the country were warned that it would be hard to replace the seven-figure sum spent by Baillie Gifford supporting literary events across Britain and so it has proved. While being as fond of the milk of human kindness as the next fellow, I am afraid my sympathy for the festivals concerned would not now fill a thimble….

Meanwhile, the book festival is precisely the kind of institution forever deploring so-called “culture wars” while actively participating in them and, indeed, picking a side. This is especially true of the sex and gender wars. The festival’s organisers are very keen to trumpet appearances from trans activists and allied writers such as Juno Dawson and Munroe Bergdorf while quite noticeably declining to invite any gender critical writers at all.

So no Julie Bindel this year and no Victoria Smith and no Jenny Lindsay and no Helen Lewis either even though all have new books, some of which address questions of sex and gender that have become prominent legal, political and cultural talking points in recent times. Especially, you may have noticed, in Scotland. Yet none of the Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, contributors to a bestselling book of that name, have been invited to Edinburgh either. Even though many of them live in the city.

This cannot be a coincidence. The case of Lindsay is especially notable, for while ignoring her, the book festival has ample space for many of the people who attempted to destroy her career. Alice Tarbuck, for instance, was mildly reprimanded, but not sacked, by her employer, Creative Scotland, when it emerged she had been encouraging a bookshop not to stock Lindsay’s book. She gets an Edinburgh gig; her victim does not.

I stress that the book festival is entirely at liberty to pick a side. It can invite whomever it wants. Yet others are also allowed to note that it has chosen the side that misrepresents the law, believes in literally impossible things, and is overly fond of wishing lurid acts of sexual violence upon those women who dare to point out legal and biological truths. The Karens were right, which is why they can never be forgiven.

It is a great shame such a fine and useful institution has succumbed to fashionable idiocy and anti-capitalist agitprop like this but like many regrettable things we can but hope that, in time, this too shall pass.

They may not get any gender-critical writers – and certainly not JK Rowling, who just happens to live in Edinburgh – but at least they get a special guest appearance from Nicola Sturgeon. So there's that.