Poet hits out at 'infantile' Baillie Gifford campaigners

The Herald Scotland

5 days ago

Paterson, one of Scotland's most successful poets in modern times, suggested the publishing industry should have done more to 'rally round' festivals which faced pressure to drop the Edinburgh-based investment firm.
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The multi award-winning writer and musician claimed 'a lack of national pride' was to blame for the targeting of book festivals over their backing by Baillie Gifford.
Writing in a new collection of essays on Scottish culture, Paterson – a former winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry – suggested that the some of the 'book worker ringleaders' of the campaign had only recently moved to Scotland.
Poet Don Paterson has co-edited a new collection of essays on Scotland's cultural landscape. Picture: Gordon Terris He added that their 'first major cultural contribution was to trash beautiful things that others had spent decades building.'
The Edinburgh International Book Festival, which returns this weekend, was the first of a number of UK literary festivals to be targeted over its Baillie Gifford sponsorship in the wake of report of the company's investments in firms involved in the fossil fuels industry.
Poet Don Paterson has condemned the authors involved in the Fossil Free Books campaign. Picture: Gordon Terris
Climate activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of a sold-out appearance at the 2023 festival, protesters staged a walk-out from an event and 50 writers threatened to boycott the EIBF in future if it did not sever its links with Baillie Gifford.
The Fossil Free Books campaign went on to target book festivals across Britain last May by demanding that they sever all links with Baillie Gifford due to its involvement in the coal, oil and gas sectors.
Hundreds of writers backed an open letter warning festivals to 'expect escalation, including the expansion of boycotts, increased author withdrawal of labour, and increased disruption.'
The festivals in Edinburgh, the Borders and Wigtown, Scotland's official book town, all announced the end of their partnerships within weeks.
Paterson was among a group of leading Scottish authors who later signed an open letter describing the targeting of book festivals over their involvement with Baillie Gifford as 'deeply retrograde' and 'ill thought-out.'
Others included Alexander McCall Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Doug Johnstone, David Greig and Liz Lochhead.
Many of the writers who backed the Fossil Free Books campaign have been invited to take part in this year's Edinburgh book festival, including Ali Smith, Hannah Lavery, Jess Brough, Raymond Antrobus, Chitra Ramaswamy, Andrés N Ordorica, Harry Josephine Giles and Katie Goh.
The new collection of essays - which was jointly edited by Paterson and former Makar Kathleen Jamie - was instigated by the two poets in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum.
The book also features contributions by the current Makar, Peter Mackay, and the writer Neal Ascherson, Jenny Lindsay, Stuart Kelly and James Robertson.
In his essay, Paterson claimed national pride had been 'hollowed out' in Scotland over the decade.
He told how many of his friends had commented on how many institutions, university programmes and arts events had started to 'shed their distinctive Scottish programmes like a bad smell.'
Paterson said Scotland was rapidly becoming a 'little save haven for an increasingly discredited politics of identity.'
He wrote: 'What else but a lack of national pride could explain, for example, our failure to arrest the infantile antics of Fossil Free Books, and their craven, entirely confected attack on three layers of soft underbelly – Scotland, book festivals, and one of the most ecologically responsible investors and major patrons of the arts, Baillie Gifford.
'Prominent among their 'book worker' ringleaders were some overconfident, expensively educated English students, and several folk 'currently living in Scotland,' whose first major cultural intervention was to trash beautiful things that others had spent decades building.
'At no point did the young authors involved bother to 'follow the money' with regard to who sells their own books, or where the pension funds of their own publishers are invested.
'Why did we not rally round our besieged festivals, and say 'enough is enough'?
'I'm afraid one has to conclude that some recent arrivals clearly see their role as culturally corrective, much like the Italian dance-masters shipped to Edinburgh in the early 19th century to fix our rustic fiddle-playing.'
The new essay collection, published by Irish Pages, was partly funded by Creative Scotland.
However Paterson took aim at Creative Scotland in his essay, writing that the Scottish Government arts agency, and smaller arts and literature organisations it funds, had a 'projected obsession with identity politics.'
He wrote: 'Identitarianism encourages people to simplify themselves, which is one reason it will always be a favoured tool of the state.
'It generates tribal division, and – consciously or not – works as a strategy of divide-and-rule which leaves the real power in the hands of the bureaucratic overseers.
'These divisions soon began to undermine the 'civic and joyous' come-all-ye universalism the independence movement had recently aspired to.
'The sector employs many talented and conscientious individuals, and funds much good art.
'But the misplaced sense of self-importance that tends to dog the world of arts administration had led it to forget that its job was the nurturing and promotion of Scottish excellence and talent, not the defence of the culture's ideological purity.
'Then again, these institutions are always downstream of legislative culture. The same disconnect had happened via Blairite, corporate-speak neo-managerialism 20 years before.'