No more Edinburgh Book Festival for me – where did it all go wrong?

The Herald Scotland

14 hours ago

One other event at the book festival I recall, for different reasons, was a session with the writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I can't remember why I went to see her now because she's the sort of harrumphing lefty who sets off my allergies, but perhaps I figured it's good to listen to a range of views, which it is. I certainly remember being irritated when she laid into Ukip as an English not a Scottish problem even though the party had just done well in Scotland at the European elections. The same sort of flawed reasoning persists now with Reform. But the audience seemed to like it. They applauded at the end, and shuffled out for tea and biscuits.
I mention the Alibhai-Brown event in particular because even then, ten years ago, the problems with the Edinburgh Book Festival were starting to become obvious. The lack of diversity on the stage and in the audience, by which I particularly mean diversity of class. The weak, and sometimes execrable, chairing of events that fails to challenge or properly explore the writer's opinions and assumptions. And most important of all, the tendency to platform writers like Alibhai-Brown and unplatform or ignore writers of a different or more conservative persuasion. In the end, it meant the festival became a place I enjoyed less and less, and eventually I just stopped going.
But, you know, it really is good to listen to a range of views and I'm a hopeful sort of person on the whole, so this year, like every year, I looked at the line-up on the festival website to see if there was something good and if things had changed, and I scrolled and scrolled and saw that the answer was no. Things appear to be just as bad as ever, worse in fact, and the worry is that the problems at the book festival may have started to rot it from the inside. You start to wonder: how long will it last?
The most obvious symptom of the problems is the lack of diversity on stage, which is worse than ever. One of the biggest stories of the last year – and the focus of one of the biggest-selling books of the year – was the trans debate and the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of 'woman', and yet you will not find a trace of it on the festival line-up. The book in question, The Women Who Wouldn't Wheest, was edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, so why haven't they been invited? Is it because – unlike one of the big guests of the festival Nicola Sturgeon – they are seen to be on the wrong side of the debate? Yes, of course it is.
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The chairman of the festival, Alan Little, rather gave the game away when he said the festival should be 'a place where progressive and nuanced discussion can happen in a safe and respectful space'. He's spot on with nuanced – we need it badly – but why only progressive? Why not traditionalist or conservative as well? And what's with 'safe'? It's become one of those words certain activists use to ratchet up the pressure, to hystericalise, but would the festival be unsafe because the line-up included Susan Dalgety or Lucy Hunter Blackburn? The only thing that would be unsafe would be the consensus that's dominated the festival and still does.
The organisers would probably say in their defence that there would be a threat of disruption from activists – indeed, that was reason they gave for dropping Baillie Gifford as one of their sponsors. A number of activists, you will remember, a very small number, demanded the investment company be dropped on the grounds it invests in fossil fuels and sad to say, the organisers caved. They said they could not be expected to deliver a festival that was safe – there's that word again – because there was a threat of disruption from activists and so they ended their relationship with Baillie Gifford but more importantly they ended their relationship with Baillie Gifford's money.
But it didn't have to be that way. First of all, if everyone buckled as quickly as the festival did over the threat of disruption to the free expression of views, we'd be in a very unpleasant place indeed; their weakness is pathetic. They could also have borrowed some of the stoicism of the Fringe which faced similar pressure over Baillie Gifford from the same sort of activists, but stood firm and it all came to nothing. To put it another way, everyone was perfectly safe.
The Edinburgh Book Festival (Image: Newsquest)
The organisers of the book festival also appear to be guilty of a kind of economic and practical idiocy that now threatens their future. There are some people who object to corporate sponsorship of arts events – so what: the only alternative is an increase in public money and that ain't happenin'. Baillie Gifford also invests in fossil fuels – so what: it invests far more in clean energy, and the objections of the activists led to the cancellation of a million pounds in money for the arts. The danger here is that the arts world ends up, in the words of the director of the Science Museum Ian Blatchford, eaten alive by its own piety.
And the risks are particularly high for book festivals aren't they? We saw what happened to Aye Write in Glasgow when it failed to get funding from Creative Scotland; it only went ahead after a donation from the charity set up by the Lottery winner Colin Weir. The Edinburgh book festival is also going ahead this year thanks largely to a donation from Ian Rankin. But how long before the activists start digging into the personal views of the philanthropists writing cheques? And is this what they want: the arts funded by a few wealthy individuals? It doesn't sound all that progressive to me.
Better, I think, to try to build more robust festivals that have a chance of lasting and that must mean some changes. First, encourage a broad diversity of views and opinions at the festival that will attract a broader and more diverse audience. Secondly, drop the piety and encourage corporate sponsorship because public money is not coming to save you. And thirdly, be robust when the activists rock up and shout 'unsafe!' They only have power because you give it to them. Reject them. Ignore them. And carry on.
Mark Smith is a Herald features writer and opinion writer