Why I Will Not Be Boycotting EIBF

a week of strong feelings and big debates.

(This is a post that I’ve had in my drafts folder since the 28th May. The situation has since changed, with EIBF and Ballie Gifford parting ways. In this development, the leverage to divest has likely been lost. A number of festivals have lost their match funding meaning that they’ve lost funding from Ballie Gifford AND the same again. Scotland’s cultural landscape is bleak, not to mention the knock on effects for the Scottish economy. Many authors, myself included, are trying to work out where we go from here. I thought for a while about leaving this in drafts, but it feels like something I need to say, before moving on.)

This is a story about book festivals. It is also a story about scapegoats. It is a story about rural Scotland. And it is a story about selective principles.

In case you haven’t heard, and it’s likely you haven’t, since the book industry largely carries inflated ideas of its own importance, a group of unnamed activists formed a coalition called Fossil Free Books (FFB), who aim to make the book industry fossil free. So far, so laudable. Last year, FFB called on authors to sign an open letter calling on EIBF and Hay Festival to divest of their main sponsors, Ballie Gifford, due to Ballie Gifford’s investments in oil. A number of authors signed, saying they would boycott this year’s festival if the demands weren’t met. A number of the original signatories, including Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Nick Laird and Evie Wyld did not sign the most recent letter.

Since, FFB have investigated BG further, and added their arms related investment to the reason for a boycott. BG state that their investment only equals 2% of their overall funds, but only 2% is still a lot of money. Also 2% is a standard way to mitigate the risk of a fund, and risk is the backbone of investment. So, yes, 2 percent is still far too much money, talking in ethical terms. I’m not here going to go into the various back and forward from each regarding the veracity of statements, or the claims that they do not invest in arms, certainly they invest in semiconductors often used in arms. I am not at any point here trying to defend Ballie Gifford, although I will say that in making their investments public, unlike many financial institutions, they have made themselves an easier target.

But, ethics are complicated, and to say that calls for nuance equal complicity, is untrue, nuance is necessary in a complicated interconnected world. This issue can’t be viewed in black and white because simply, the world is shady. Very shady.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the shady complexity of the publishing industry. Last year, I had a long conversation with the director of one of Scotland’s festivals, also funded by BG. At that stage FFB hadn’t called on a boycott of the smaller festivals, I’m unsure if this is because they were unaware of the spread of their funding or if they hoped that in targeting Hay and EIBF, their demands would be met more easily. This conversation was useful in that it helped me understand not only why big sponsors are essential, but also the difficulty of sponsorship money, and the good festivals do. I am not here making a defence for putting bad money to good use, I am simply talking about the difficulty of obtaining money. A difficulty most authors are aware of, when the median author salary stands at £6,000. This makes campaigning about dirty money hard. It also means that while it is perhaps simpler to sign a letter, safe in the knowledge that 800+ other people have with an organisation behind you in support, than to assess where money in the wider industry comes from or to question what good a boycott will do against the harm a loss of sponsorship will incur, or how this will affect future sponsorship in the long term.

I spent two weeks and many nights researching finances in the publishing industry. And it is not a pretty picture. If I am to boycott EIBF or any festival sponsored by BG on the grounds they invest in oil and arms related activity, then I must also boycott Waterstones, Amazon, The Woman’s Prize, The Sunday Times Young Writers Prize, and a number of publishers- including the big four, two of whom I’m published by - for various complicated financial reasons I am not going to go into here; it is easier, indeed, to turn down a £200 festival appearance than it is the possibility of a £20,000 prize. It is easier also to turn down this than ACE funding from the Government or AHRC funding - neither of which come out of scrutiny looking good.

Now I know the narrow focus of a boycott is meant to guarantee efficiency, but if I was to select only one, I’d be a hypocrite. I would lose, I feel, all authority to speak about this. As an author, I am not about to compromise my authority.

I lived as a hypocrite for a large amount of my life, professing to believe one thing and secretly doing another. I would be doing the same if I was to make a scapegoat of BG, while selling my first serial rights to a Murdoch owned company. I cannot express my outrage on a meta owned platform with my iPhone, and feel any sense of moral victory. Let’s also ask everyone to scrutinise the universities they work for, the media corporations they write for who themselves engineer news and public bias, let’s all look at the social media platforms we use to further our own publicity - also, ironically, part of BG’s portfolio of investments. Let’s do this and then ask, who amongst us can be counted. Is this focus on BG a hope for absolution? Because targeting BG while ignoring the other companies with the same investments is at best only a hope for some temporary easing of the feeling of complicity. I think here of the quiet small voice spoken about in 2 Kings, this voice in many ways is the voice of conscience. Personal to each of us.

I understand the argument for divestment. I sincerely wish it was possible. I understand too how boycotts work and that they can work. But in this situation, so far all that’s been achieved is that Hay have ‘suspended’ their relationship with BG, while the existence of other valuable cultural institutions has been thrown into question. When Nan Goldin campaigned against the Sacklers, she didn’t endanger the institutions who used their name or benefited from their money. And I think, as artists, this is also a responsibility we must balance protest against. It is difficult to understand how a boycott that only saves the company in question money is an effective one, or an efficient means of protest.

Book festivals are meeting places, not just for the public to meet authors, but for the public to encounter fresh ideas. It can be difficult to remember this when you’re surrounded by ideas and enlivening conversations; but these festivals present both a cultural and economic lifeline to the communities they serve.

Growing up in rural Scotland in the 1980s, I was removed from the world of ideas. Fortunately I had two passionate grandparents, one who was heavily involved in the teacher’s union in Scotland, and, as a son of a mining engineer, had an abiding, red hot hatred of Thatcher. The other, a doctor, campaigned for the Liberal Democrats back when they were worth campaigning for. There was passion and a sense of what it meant to be a citizen. My father money laundered for the ANC in apartheid South Africa, but that as they say, is very much a different story.

Edinburgh International Book Festival felt like and was, a window into another world. Mostly, I didn’t go to anything there but to walk past Charlotte Square and see the tents, or visit the cafe for some juice, that was enough to alert me to the fact this world existed. The first thing I remember seeing at the festival was Ian McEwan around about 2002 or ‘03. I remember putting my hand up to ask a question, my heart thumping. I wasn’t picked. I was relieved. The thought of talking to an author, too much. I have since encountered Etgar Keret, Nathan Englander, Marlon James, Zadie Smith, Andrew Cockburn, Rachel Cusk, Chris Power, PJ Harvey, Brian Cox, David Keenan, Lydia Davis, Rob Doyle, and the list goes on, there. I have interviewed authors, I have chaired authors, I sat writing reviews in the press tent two days after my grandmother died, I was 7 months pregnant when I typed the reflective part of my MA to the rhythm of Nathan Englander coming through the walls of the same tent, I have been swallowed by apocalyptic weather there, I have sat and sunburned on the grass, I listened to Salman Rushdie the same day I discovered I was expecting my second son. When I signed to PRH they asked me what a career highlight would be, and the only answer was to appear at EIBF. Some might say I need higher ambitions. Now, you could argue that my ethical integrity is being threatened by nostalgia. And yet, my decision to attend this year has nothing to do with nostalgia.

It has everything to do with the fact that book festivals are the life blood of Scotland. They are places for people globally to unite, in person or digitally. The are, as the festival’s strap line said, a place for ideas to come alive. Ideas must come alive if we’re ever to solve any of the interconnected problems we face. Ideas must also transfer to the local community if we’re to inspire a future generation of children to be engaged. And not just that, communities quite simply need economic injections, and book festivals also offer this.

Wigtown Book Festival is a prime example of this. Set on the western edges of the Scottish Borders, Wigtown offers a life line to the local economy. Last year, I sat in a taxi listening to the driver tell me how much of his business he does in two weeks. Wigtown itself has been transformed into Scotland’s book town, drawing thousands of visitors to an otherwise overlooked part of the country, pumping millions into a vulnerable economy. And let’s not forget, stray from the main streets of Edinburgh, stay on the main streets of Glasgow, and you will see just how very much Scotland needs that money. Visit inner city schools and you’ll see the need for the cultural capital, the same with rural schools. Scotland needs art. Wigtown’s is such a successful regeneration story that it’s often used as a case study. The loss or depreciation of Wigtown would deal a devastating blow both culturally and economically to the local economy.

Is this to say that any of this absolves the use of money from oil and arms related activities? No, it doesn’t absolve it. But it’s a case against simplifying the complicated, it’s a case against simply removing money that could be termed dirty, especially when authors accept money from other sources that are just as tarnished. I saw one author tweet saying ‘solidarity not moral perfectionism’ and I agree that solidarity is important, but it is not a way of absolving ourselves. If I were to put my head above the parapet and decline an invite, then I would also be striving as hard as I could to attain at least a degree of ‘moral perfectionism’. I stand in solidarity with the book festivals in part because I can’t attain the moral perfectionism I would need to to do otherwise.

It is ourselves we reckon with each night, and again, afresh each morning. This is a private reckoning. It is often a painful one. It is one I have done many times in an effort to understand where money comes from, where money I call mine comes from and my money goes, it is a reckoning that has at every step guided my choice, not only to appear at festivals, but to publicly support them. Having spoken to others who’ve supported FFB and feel equally as passionately as I do about culture, the task at hand is now to think how we, not only repair the cultural landscape, but how we make it more robust. There have to be more effective worker led models we can adopt, and these don’t need to mean establishing new festivals and working from the ground up. The work of building EIBF, Wigtown, Hay and others has been titanic, and it must not be lost. Innovative funding models must now be employed. I think, in many ways, each side - for want of a better word - each expression then, is reflecting the same thing, we care about the wider world, we want a fairer world, and now we need to work out how to get from here to there.

(Since there have been claims that authors with similar views to mine are only annoyed because FFB are right; this annoyance apparently an indication that FFB’s actions were correct, speaking for myself, I can say this is untrue. I am saddened because of the harm done to the cultural and economic capital of a country I love. I also do not agree that the funding situation festivals now find themselves in is nothing to do with FFB, it is everything to do with recent action. I was happy to put my name to this letter, along with many of Scotland’s outspoken authors.)