This might ruffle feathers, but it can’t be avoided.
Fossil Free Books has led a huge campaign against investment company Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of various book festivals. It began with the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year; now, in 2024, the Hay Festival has been bumped into suspending its connections with the company.
The issue with Baillie Gifford is primarily that it invests around £5 billion in fossil fuel companies. There isn’t really much debate about this, as the figures quoted come from Baillie Gifford’s own prospectus. Baillie Gifford’s response is that it’s only 2% of all of tis investments, and that it’s investing 11% in renewables. However, such is the size of Baillie Gifford’s total portfolio that 2% actually is £5 billion. It’s a huge company, simple as that.
More recently, there have been criticisms that the company has links to companies with strong support for the Israeli Government’s assault on Gaza. That’s a more obscure charge, connecting Baillie Gifford’s investment in IT firms with those firms contracts with the Israeli military. I’ll come back to that later.
Fossil Free Books’ attacks on book festivals seems a bit strange to me. Events such as these exist precisely to offer platforms to the widest possible range of writers. Last year, climate activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of an Edinburgh International Book Festival event at the prompting of Fossil Free Books, depriving hundreds of people of the chance to hear her argue her case. The events were sellouts. Presumably, those who had bought tickets were both sympathetic to climate activism and had no problems with Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship.
I’m certain that Ms Thunberg and her team will have many times greater carbon footprint than me. I only take a flight every few years, and travelling by train, bus or ship isn’t as carbon-free as climate activists would have us believe. And let’s not kid ourselves here: the vast majority of these activists are educated middle-class, many of whom have cars in addition to the bicycles they parade in public. By and large, poor people are more concerned with paying rent and heating bills, and with worrying about where the next meal will come from. Many of these activists will happily watch Manchester City or Newcastle United – even on television – pretending that these football clubs’ Saudi owners don’t have dirty backgrounds. They’ll have bank accounts and pensions that quietly invest in places the investors would rather we didn’t know about, or perhaps they don’t know about themselves.
One of my beefs with the environmentalist lobby is that they’re so intent on telling us what we shouldn’t be doing that they don’t focus on what we can do instead. Many, many people have to use cars – because of the types of journeys they have to make, or because they’re elderly or physically incapable of cycling, or for childcare reasons. Instead of saying ‘you don’t need a car’, for instance, consider how to encourage car users to make more efficient journeys. If you must take the car to a supermarket, for instance, try to do so on the way to or from something else. Instead, the incessantly negative approach leads to a dialogue of the deaf.
The root cause of Baillie Gifford’s association with fossil fuels is that it’s such a big investment fund. Sure, it invests £5 billion in fossil fuels, but it invests four or five times that sum in renewables. Spun another way (and I’m sure it’s the preferred Baillie Gifford way), the company is a leading investor in renewable energies. As Ben Goldacre would say, I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that.
I’m bemused by the Israeli thing. Instruments manufactured by Cisco Systems, for instance, are used in aircraft across the world, both military and civil. The UK and US governments are investing up to their waist in Israel, both directly and indirectly. Are Fossil Free Books advocating that no arts organisation should accept a government grant? Meanwhile, supporters are using social media giants like Twitter/X and Facebook to state their views, as if people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are saints. Turning the focus onto Gaza makes it even less likely that Baillie Gifford will shift what funds they have out of fossil fuel companies because it looks as if, whatever Baillie Gifford does, activists will just keep looking for further excuses to pick on them.
I’m left feeling that arts festivals are picked on because they’re soft targets. Governments ignore organisations like Fossil Free Books, but Fossil Free Books can damage a book festival badly – so badly, in fact, that it might not be able to continue. It’s classic bullying behaviour.
If you refuse to listen to someone, if all you do is scream and shout at them, they’ll never listen to you. And let those who are without sin cast the first stones.
Tales from the Heart of the City 