Over last the year, a small anonymous protest collective calling itself Fossil Free Books has been trying to convince Baillie Gifford, a massive Scottish investment firm with about $400 billion (US) in assets under management, to divest from the energy business and Israel’s “defence, tech, and cyber-security industries.”
Rather than directly protest the company, Fossil Free Books took aim at a number of literary festivals sponsored by Baillie Gifford. It organized a petition with about 700 signatures and convinced dozens of authors to cancel their appearances at two of the world’s best festivals, Hay and Edinburgh.
The two festivals capitulated and fired Baillie Gifford as a sponsor. Baillie Gifford answered by withdrawing the $1.3 million (US) it was donating annually to a range of UK festivals, including Cambridge, Stratford, Wigton, Henley, and Cheltenham. Two other festivals, Borders and Wimbledon, have also cut ties with Baillie Gifford, the former voluntarily, the latter ambiguously.
So a campaign aimed at trying to convince Baillie Gifford to divest from oil & gas & Israel succeeded only in convincing Baillie Gifford to divest from literary sponsorship, devastating the festival sector (the company continues to support the excellent Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize… for now).
It requires some unpacking to see just how strange and regrettable all of this is.
Let’s start with Fossil Free Books. It’s a one-year-old, rag-tag organization of mostly book industry employees with a crude website and a mere 3,100 followers on X. The group managed to get Greta Thunberg and Naomi Klein to sign its petition, but that’s scarcely a challenge. Regardless of whether or not you agree with its causes, Fossil Free Books is not Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion. It’s a meme protest.
Fans of the organization have been celebrating as though they struck a David-v-Goliath blow against Baillie Gifford, not seeming to recognize who took the hit and who is $1.3 million richer.
Or as Scottish novelist Chris Brookmyre said: “A lot of writers are very angry. Self-immolation is spectacular, but what do you do for an encore?”
One anonymous FFB organizer, speaking to the Financial Times, did seem to appreciate that the group miscalculated. “We were pretty shocked when Hay said it was dropping Baillie Gifford. We expected it to be a much longer-term campaign. Our campaign was meant to be the start of a negotiation.”
FFB has nevertheless continues to hammer away at Baillie Gifford in the wake of the defunding.
Were the charges levelled at Baillie Gifford legitimate? I suppose so, if you think having any exposure to fossil fuels and Israel is evil. The firm has relatively minor investments in oil and gas, far less than most companies of its kind. For FFB, investments in supermarkets that sell gasoline are offside. Baillie Gifford also holds shares in Babcock International, a UK-based aerospace and defence company that does business in France, Canada, Australia, and Israel. This outrages FFB, as do Baillie Gifford’s investments in Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Nvidia, all of which have “direct or indirect links to Israel's defence, tech and cybersecurity industries.”
Nick Thomas, a partner at Baillie Gifford, blames social media for accommodating a simplistic critique of capitalism that fails to recognize that in today’s economy, “everything is linked to everything.”
“An activist can say X is linked to Y and that’s linked to you, and then you’re suddenly offside,” he continues. “You suffer a visceral reaction to a tenuous connection. We can point out that it’s tenuous, but not everyone is willing to think it through.”
If one does think it through, the BBF approach promises an end of corporate funding of the arts. There is no company you can’t get to by connecting “direct or indirect” dots. The major UK banks are heavily invested in oil and gas, and every other company in the UK does business with the banks.
FFB, in fact, seems generally opposed to corporate sponsorship. Its database of approved arts funding organizations includes mostly universities and philanthropies. Of course, all of those organizations also have accounts, credit, investments, and relationships with banks. I’m not sure why the shunning stops at them.
The ultimate goal of FFB seems to be to replace corporate funding with public funding, which might be more sensible if the public contribution to culture in the UK hadn’t fallen by about a third over the last decade. And also if the UK government itself wasn’t operating a system of investment protections for fossil fuels and writing export licenses for arms to Israel.
Canada is no different, by the way. The major sponsors of the arts in Canada are banks and, given the extractive nature of the Canadian economy, all of them are far dirtier than Baillie Gifford; all can be connected to Israel through defence industry investments; and every other business, philanthropy, and institution in Canada does business with the banks. The Government of Canada owns the Trans Mountain Pipeline system, derives tens of billions in income from fossil fuel industries, comes nowhere close to meeting its climate targets, and has been sending military exports to Israel throughout the war in Gaza. By FFB rules, there is no safe sponsor for the arts.
A lot of commentary in the UK has been critical of Fossil Free Books in the wake of Baillie Gifford’s departure. “It’s a huge bloody issue,” said David McWilliams, who runs Ireland’s Dalkey Book Festival. “If you don’t get corporate money you have to put ticket prices up.” He credits the activists with a “Pyrrhic victory. If this continues, a lot of people will just drop out of the festival world. It’s very easy to destroy something and it takes years to create something.”
That FFB is taking most of the blame for this mess seems misguided. The organizers of the Hay and Edinburgh festivals did a much worse job of thinking things through. Their job was to run their shows for the benefit of their whole communities: all of the authors, along with the publishers, agents, booksellers, press, festival attendees, volunteers, and sponsors. They effectively handed over leadership of their organizations to an aggrieved and anonymous minority—people delighted to use the festivals as props in online protest theatre, people who were never going to be accountable for outcomes.
Now the UK festivals all find themselves in deep holes, and the damage is in danger of compounding. A lot of writers are very angry, not without cause. Canada’s last two major literary events, the Giller Prize and the Politics & The Pen gala, both made headlines not for their literature, but for the anti-war protests that disrupted proceedings. PEN America had an event stormed and shut down by activists in LA last February and its annual literary gala in New York was briefly cancelled this spring before organizers chose to forge ahead.
You have to ask why would anyone want to sponsor a literary prize or event in this environment, and these things don’t happen without sponsorship or, at least, they’ll only happen in a much smaller, less inclusive, less effective manner.
With luck, there will be learnings from the Baillie Gifford debacle. The Hay and Edinburgh festivals should have followed the example of the Pen America organizers, who stood their ground and managed to pull off a well-attended, well-reviewed event, even with protestors inside and out.
And perhaps activists will recognize there are ways to protest the bad they think corporations do without destroying the undoubted good they do.
PS - Since writing this, I came across last week’s article in the Walrus about a number of authors boycotting the Giller Prize over its sponsorship agreement with Scotiabank, which has an investment in the defence contractor Elbit Systems. “How the Giller Prize Became Associated with Genocide: Scotiabank’s military investments have tainted one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards,” writes the Walrus.
I like the Walrus, but found it odd that it accepted the authors’ framing of these issues, and didn’t run the usual disclaimer. The magazine counts among its lead benefactors TD, RBC, and Google. Both banks are linked to the Israeli military through defence investments (not to mention their fossil fuel investments—groups like FFB have been adamant that climate and Gaza are “entwined”). And Google has direct contracts with Israel’s government and military.
Also odd, the authors interviewed seem not to have appreciated these associations. Either that, or they’re running a very selective boycott.
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This is a very distressing article Kenneth. As a Member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Authors Association, I can tell you that our members depend heavily on festivals and book fairs to get their books in front of the reading public. And in turn these venues depend heavily on sponsors to get off the ground. It’s impressive(!), and very ‘scary’ (to use a much exaggerated term) that a radical few can disrupt the lives and well-fare of so many. Doug Jordan, Treasurer, Canadian Authors.
Everyone's complicit in the dark ,dirty, unethical, murderous activities of monstrous corporations, so hey, let's not do anything about it. Let's just continue taking their money, art washing it a bit, continuing to write and sell books about all of the horrors and keep discussing them inside the tents. Cool.