Fossil fuel activists attack literary and music festivals

Defunding cultural events by attacking sponsors will impoverish us all.

Activist group Fossil Free Books (FFB) have succeeded in defunding over half a dozen literary festivals by demanding that they part ways from the investment firm Baillie Gifford. FFB object to Baillie Gifford’s investment in the fossil fuel industry and companies that are active in Israel/Gaza. 

The shit hit the fan initially with the Hay festival, with FFB drumming up outrage amongst some authors and attendees who in turn demanded that Hay sever ties with Baillie Gifford. With people like Charlotte Church, Dawn Butler MP, and Nish Kumar threatening to stay away and other authors being warned that they may face protests if they attended, Hay felt they had no choice. 

Are Baillie Gifford problematic?

Baillie Gifford, for the record, say that they are not a significant fossil fuels investor, and that they’ve been working with companies with “problematic operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, namely Airbnb, Booking Holdings and Cemex” to encourage them to change their approach. As far as it goes, Baillie Gifford really aren’t the big bad that FFB are making them out to be. 

As Nils Pratley wrote, the activists are making absurd demands:

Few portfolios in the mainstream asset management world are entirely free of fossil fuel assets but Baillie Gifford’s are definitely at the less oily end. As the firm has pointed out repeatedly in recent weeks, only 1% of the £225bn of the assets it manages is invested directly in fossil fuel companies, and the figure is still only 2% if one includes stocks such as supermarkets that sell petrol. That’s versus an industry average of 11%. […]

For the activists, the fact that 1% to 2% adds up to the seemingly large number of £2.5bn-£5bn is all that matters – never mind that a single oil company, Shell, is worth almost £200bn, and never mind that Baillie Gifford is not free to divest because, as is normal, it manages to mandates set by its clients.

FFB are also demanding that Baillie Gifford divest from Nvidia, the semiconductor group, plus Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Pratley points out that these are incredibly widely held stocks and it’s very, very difficult to divest from them. 

It’s important to point out, however, that mentioning these facts doesn’t make one an apologist for the fossil fuels industry, nor does it signal approval for any acts of genocide or terrorism. I am very wholly against both, but what I want to see is positive, systemic change, not FFB’s grandstanding.

More dominoes fall

The contagion spread with the The Edinburgh International Book Festival ending its agreement with Baillie Gifford. The company then withdrew funding from all literary festivals that it had previously supported, including Cambridge, Stratford, Wigtown, Henley, Borders, and Cheltenham. Many of these festivals had been supported by Baillie Gifford for 10 to 20 years, or more. 

Speaking to the i, Wigtown Book Festival’s Adrian Turpin said that “The financial position for most festivals is already fragile. We’re constantly searching for new sources of funding but now we have £100,000 missing from our five-year plan.”

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has now warned that all cultural events are becoming “unattractive” to sponsors. The Fringe board voted to maintain their relationship with Baillie Gifford, not least because of a lack of support from Edinburgh City Council and the Scottish Government. But they will undoubtedly come under more pressure as the outrage spreads. 

And spread it has.

In their newsletter, Tortoise reported that: 

On Friday, Barclaycard suspended sponsorship of Latitude, Camp Bestival, Download and the Isle of Wight festival after musicians organised by Bands Against Barclays refused to perform, protesting Barclays’ involvement in companies supplying the IDF [Israeli Defence Force].

Barclays say they have “supported the UK music and arts sector with £112m over the past 20 years”. It’s unclear what will happen to funding for next year’s festivals.

Why target cultural festivals?

Fossil Free Books haven’t specified why they are going after book festivals, rather than, as Tortoise points out, other companies with dirtier hands:

• Elliot Investment Management, which owns Waterstones and Barnes and Noble and trades in crude oil and oil products.

• The KKR private equity fund, which actively invests in oil and gas and owns Simon & Schuster, whose authors include FFB organisers Emma Reynolds and Omar Robert Hamilton.

• Fossil fuel investors Causeway Capital Management, Blackrock and the Vanguard Group, which are WH Smith’s largest shareholders.

But the reasoning is laid bare by Mark Lynas, a climate change writer and campaigner, who points out that literary festivals are a soft target: 

It’s a clever campaign because it immediately puts writers and other performers scheduled to appear at Hay in a dilemma. If they sign the statement as demanded and withdraw from the festival they lose the chance to present their work to an engaged audience at a festival with a high profile and a proud history as the world’s premier books event.

If they don’t sign, and go ahead with their event regardless, they risk looking like they don’t care about climate change and don’t support the brave activists who are trying to de-legitimise fossil fuels. Hay’s a pretty liberal-lefty event, so no-one wants to be seen to refuse to take a moral stance when it is demanded that they do so in public.

Lynas’s piece in particular is worth reading, as he points out just how engaged Hay have been in reducing their carbon footprint and taking climate change seriously. They are allies, not enemies, in the fight against climate change. 

Once lost, funding isn’t easy to replace

But this whole story has made me furious. I know from personal experience with Ada Lovelace Day that the funding landscape is, at the moment, a complete nightmare. It’s incredibly difficult to get any sort of sponsorship for any event. 

A couple of months ago, Glasgow literary festival Aye Write had to cancel because “its funding application was turned down by Creative Scotland”. 

Glasgow Life, a council-funded charity, announced that its funding application for Aye Write and Wee Write – a festival for children and young people – was unsuccessful. “Both events are dependent on external funding that is not guaranteed from year to year,” said the charity.

Just last month, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction was still seeking sponsors for next year, its second year. I haven’t heard whether or not they’ve been successful, but I know how hard they will have been working to try to find enough funding. And after 30 years, Bristol Festival of Ideas announced it was closing at the end of last year, again citing a loss of income and sponsorship.

My own event, Ada Lovelace Day, nearly closed in 2022 and may yet close this year due to an ongoing lack of sponsorship. And we’re not alone. Women Who Code (USA) and Tech Girls Movement (NZ) have both closed in the last six months, and last year funding issues forced 500 Women Scientists to scale back operations. I have a spreadsheet of another couple of dozen organisations in the women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) space that have just gone dark. I’m sure there are more that I just don’t know about.

For FFB to demand that literary festivals drop a sponsor without lining up a replacement is the height of arrogance and irresponsibility. And it’s even more infuriating because these authors aren’t withdrawing their books from Amazon or Waterstones, they aren’t deleting their Facebook profiles or Instagram accounts. And in some cases, they seem quite happy to be associated with sponsors that have much greater exposure to fossil fuels than Baillie Gifford. 

There’s every likelihood that some of the affected festivals will not bounce back from this and will have to put up prices, reduce the size of their festivals, or even close. Every one of those festival teams is going to be small, overstretched and underpaid. They're also now all going to be panicking about how they are going to replace this funding.

Long-term funders like Baillie Gifford are a rarity, in my experience, with most funders working on a year-to-year basis. This lack of commitment from funders damages an organisation’s ability to plan ahead or to grow. It was not just the money that Baillie Gifford gave these festivals, it was stability. 

It won’t be Baillie Gifford that feels the pinch

And who suffers? Well, it’s not Baillie Gifford, who manage “£225 billion of global funds” and who will no doubt find other places to put the £1m per year that they were spending on book festivals. But it will be authors, readers, children, schools and local businesses.

Authors 

Many authors are already struggling, with advances dropping every year and royalties not enough to live off. The CREATe survey asked 60,000 “Primary occupation authors […] who allocate at least 50% of their working time to writing” about their income, and discovered that the median is now £7,000 per year, down from £12,330 in 2006 (£17,608 when adjusted for inflation). That’s around £7.77 per hour, if you assume they are working exactly half of a 1,800 working hour year. The National Living Wage, remember, is £ 11.44 per hour. 

I’m not saying that one appearance at a festival is enough to fix the structural problems or make up for terrible advances and royalty payments, but they can help an author take off and are an important part of the promotional mix. Indeed, with most large social media site punishing posts that include links, one could argue that in-person events are more important than ever. 

Readers, children & schools

Readers also lose out. If they can’t replace the funding, festivals may be forced to cut their programming, which will probably mean fewer big name authors, shorter events, less outreach. None of which is great for attendees. 

Lots of book festivals put on events specifically for children. Given that 30 per cent of British five-year-olds are “falling behind their expected reading levels” according to data from 2022/23, we need to be doing everything in our power to encourage more kids to enjoy reading. 

And that’s not just about hoping that kids grow up to enjoy books for the sake of pleasures, it’s because kinds that read for pleasure will develop better reading skills, and that will have a major impact on their life as adults. 

Researchers found that poor literacy skills will end up costing the economy £830m over the lifetimes of each year group of five-year-olds, or £7,800 per child.

This adds up to a £5,300 loss in potential earnings per child over their lifetime, research from Pro Bono Economics has found. It will also cost an average of £2,500 per child in additional support from the government, the charity said.

You could potentially argue that the kind of kids that have parents that take them to book festivals are going to be doing OK. But the Baillie Gifford-backed Schools Programme at the Borders Book Festival 2023 was specifically designed for schools to attend both in-person and online, with some sessions available to watch free on demand after the event. They were also able to provide a grants to schools to help cover up to 75 per cent of travel costs. 

We desperately need to get more children excited by books and reading and writing, and book festivals are one part of that puzzle. 

Local economies

And finally, what about the economic boost to book festival towns? Hotels, restaurants, shops, everything that people use and need when visiting for festival gets additional income because more people are in town. 

The Wigtown Book Festival, for example, has generated some £50m for the Dumfries and Galloway economy since it started 25 years ago. 

Each year more than 10 times the village’s population descend on the book lovers’ haven to take in the festival.

Starting back in 1999, a central aim of the event has been to help drive regeneration across Wigtownshire (a highly rural area which has seen a steep decline in its traditional industries) and beyond.

Crucially the festival has provided a platform for artists, craft makers, food and drink producers, accommodation providers and bookdealers as well as authors.

The Borders Book Festival generated £2.5m in just four days in 2023 for a rural area that doesn’t otherwise see much of a boost. 

As well as visitors spending money on accommodation, meals, and shopping when they visit Melrose, the festival also promote local businesses, including suppliers in its ‘food and drink village’ in the garden at the town’s Harmony Hall.

Local businesses such as the Borders Distillery also see a “ripple effect” as people stay on to visit after the end of the festival. 

And for towns like Cheltenham, which I visited recently for a long weekend, festivals of different types are an essential pillar of the local economy. Cheltenham is a lovely place, but there’s very little in town for a tourist to do — there’s the art gallery/museum, the Holst museum, and a historic spa water pump room where the water’s too poisonous to drink. Cheltenham bills itself as ‘the festival town’ because it has very little else to attract tourists. 

A widespread crisis in sponsor-funded events

If it sounds like there’s a crisis in sponsor-funded events, that’s because there is. A lot of companies have been pulling their horns in and spending less on ‘corporate social responsibility’ and marketing. 

That money can’t be made up elsewhere. The vast majority of Ada Lovelace Day’s income comes from corporate sponsorship, usually small amounts of £10,000 or less. And if I’m finding it hard to find companies willing to stump up that, how hard is it going to be for book and music festivals who are looking at sums more like £100,000?

This contraction in sponsorship is going to have serious knock-on effects on our cultural landscape. Next year, there’s likely to be fewer book and music festivals, fewer events like Ada Lovelace Day, fewer events designed to delight and inspire children into exploring careers in the literary or STEM worlds.

These losses will impoverish all of us.