Edinburgh Book Festival must resist bullying of the ‘lunatic fringe’ - John McLellan

Whether you’ve read any of Salman Rushdie’s books or not, you’re likely to know he’s been living under a death threat for 35 years after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared his novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and called for the author’s assassination.

Two years ago, an American with Lebanese heritage called Hadi Matar, who supported Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, almost succeeded in claiming the Ayatollah’s $6 million bounty, knifing the novelist just before he gave a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, ironically about safe havens for writers. He was stabbed 15 times and blinded in one eye. His account of the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was published earlier this year and he is due to speak about his experience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).

If anyone epitomises defiance in the face of threats against freedom of expression it is Salman Rushdie, and this surely can’t have been lost on the EIBF’s organisers when they took the decision to end their sponsorship agreement with Edinburgh investment management firm Baillie Gifford because of “threats from activists”. Rather than defy intimidation, as Mr Rushdie has done for half his life, the plug was pulled because of potential disruption at this year’s EIBF in protest against Baillie Gifford’s relatively small investment in companies linked to fossil fuels, and others doing business in Israel. “The pressure on our team has simply become intolerable,” said new EIBF director Jenny Niven. But whatever the Fossil Free Books campaign was planning, be it chaining themselves to something immovable or chucking coloured powder at the speakers, it hardly compares with a head-hunting fatwa.

Only a fortnight ago the EIBF issued a statement to explain the importance of its association with Baillie Gifford, supporting their Children’s and Schools programme, giving free access to events and a free book for every attending pupil, and subsidised travel for schools. “Without their contribution, this crucial work simply will not happen,” it said. The obvious conclusion is the contribution was not so crucial after all, or not so crucial as to be tradeable when faced with vague menace. And if it wasn’t vague, did it occur to the EIBF decision-makers that a serious threat was a matter for the police? As if it made any difference, a statement was issued, claiming they “continue to believe that Baillie Gifford is part of the solution in transitioning towards a more sustainable world.” If so, why did they cave so easily? In April this year, Ms Niven told The Scotsman they were “going to be collaborating left, right and centre,” but now it appears that had limitations.

The question for Ms Niven and her chair, the respected ex-BBC reporter Alan Little, is where does this stop? Having conceded the point to activists, their gaze will surely go further down the sponsorship list. Baillie Gifford was the lead sponsor, but it doesn’t take long to drill into the background of the eight major sponsors to find clear links to the kind of operations with which the Fossil Free Books shower took offence. The US Embassy is a given, but there is a trio of investment companies very similar to Baillie Gifford which are now likely to be in their crosshairs. Walter Scott, the venerable Charlotte Square firm has a holding in Linde, the multinational chemical and gases giant which is committed to sustainable technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture, but inevitably has significant interests in natural gas production. The Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (SMIT), has a holding in Atlas Copco, the “world-leading provider of industrial productivity solutions”, including industrial gas generators. Although it has signalled its concerns, another investment house Rathbones continues to invest in an un-named Hong Kong company with links to thermal coal used to power generators. All have significant interests in major tech companies who will have operations in Israel, and as a mature Western democracy, the only one in the Middle East, why wouldn’t they? Apply the Baillie Gifford test and they should all go, which would collapse the Book Festival overnight.

Unfortunately, that is the voyage on which the EIBF management have now embarked because association with this festival means vulnerability to attack unprotected by a management unable to resist politically motivated assaults. Edinburgh is built on financial services, but now those institutions still involved must accept the EIBF puts the demands of the lunatic fringe before the interests of their partners and their clients. At least there has been solidarity from around seventy well-known Scottish writers, including Val McDermid and Alexander McCall Smith, who signed an open letter correctly recognising “protest actions that risk the collapse of book festivals are ill-thought-out”, and that “boycotts which threaten such platforms, and which pressure other writers to comply, are deeply retrograde.”

Retrograde is putting it mildly. Through their willingness to fold in the face of this threat, the EIBF has become a prisoner of a narrow way of thinking, the very antithesis of what the 70 writers who signed that letter seek to protect. The EIBF should be a beacon for freedom of expression but instead it has become a plaything of eco-extremism. This is a disaster for the EIBF, but it is not a disaster for book festivals because there is another way. Those standing against intimidation, like Wigtown, can declare themselves Free Book Festivals, and can gain strength from each other. What’s to stop Baillie Gifford, Walter Scott and SMIT funding a new Edinburgh Free International Book Festival for 2025, with the support of the 70 dissenting authors? They might even use the Book Festival’s former intimate home on Charlotte Square, rather than the impersonal behemoth the EIBF is threatening to become at the McEwan Hall.

If the EIBF does not reject bullying then it too should be rejected. It can carry on as a jamboree for bien pensants, while a real festival of free thinking and expression takes its rightful place.