Culture Thursday: But hey, at least we were pure!

"LL," I can hear you saying now, "what in tarnation are you talking about?"

The UK is suffused with summer book festivals. The great and the good of the literary world attend them, and they're a fixture on the British summer arts calendar.

The biggest donor to these festivals is the investment house Baillie Gifford. And, well, that's where some have a problem.

Over the past few weeks, activists have attacked festivals which take money from the firm. Firstly, part of its investments for its clients are in fossil fuel companies. And, even worse, they also have investments in Israel. Activists have demanded that the firm divest its holdings in both. And they have pressured various festivals to not take money from Baillie Gifford until they do so.

The firm explained that its investments are driven by customer directives, and that their investments in oil companies and Israel are a miniscule portion of their portfolio. But that doesn't matter. The likes of Charlotte Church pulled out of the Cheltenham Book Festival, one of the most prestigious in the UK. Succumbing to pressure, many book festivals dropped Baillie Gifford as a sponsor. 

The inevitable occurred: the firm has decided to cease sponsoring any book festival in the UK, deciding that the headache isn't worth it.

Now, let's be clear: the likes of Charlotte Church and other high profile authors who pulled out of participating of these festivals due to not wanting to be "complicit" in "ecocide" or "genocide" will do fine. Richard Osman will be fine. But the authors who rely on the book festival circuit to get their works in the public eye will not. They're not rich. They're not best-sellers. 

But of course, their livelihoods aren't the activists' concern. No, their own purity of essence is all that matters. They could have simply refused to appear at the festivals, made a personal statement, and left it at that. But like the campus protesters, that's not enough. It's not enough for them to take a personal stand. No. They have to make everyone else kowtow to their political diktat. 

And now we see the result. Most if not all festivals in the UK depended on the funding from Baillie Gifford to balance the books and put on the show. Without that money, many of these festivals will be unable to continue. Literature will be harmed. Art will be harmed. Civilization will be harmed. But for a few glorious moments, activists' Facebook pages were filled with supportive statements.

This is the true cancel culture. Rather than participate in the festivals and put forth their arguments, they simply want to shut down discussion and win by default. Baillie Gifford has never put any restrictions on topics for discussion at the festivals. But their money tainted the purity of those activists, and that could not be allowed.

The fact of it is that it's not just the right which wants to ban any art with which it doesn't agree. This litmus test that anti-oil and anti-Israel activists are placing on everything from book festivals to universities is not done to foster a healthy debate, but to stifle any dissent from their maximalist positions. And just as with right-wing book banning, the world is made a little darker by it.

You can read The Times (UK) coverage of the row here, here, and here.

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