Politics, Edinburgh Festivals and the Toffification of Culture and Public Life

This is Edinburgh Festival time – but with a difference. Across the city you cannot move for politicians and ex-politicians treading the boards and presenting their views for entertainment.

It never used to be like this – Edinburgh at Festival time, or politics – and there are consequences for both. The spaces and platforms being created by and for some politicians, journalists and commentators have an impact beyond Edinburgh and its many Festivals. What they may be doing to politics, and to public conversation, needs wider understanding.

The likes of Iain Dale, Steve Richards, and others such as Graham Spiers, are holding regular events and talking politics this year. In a category of his own is former First Minister Alex Salmond who has taken his travelling road show to Edinburgh with his faithful sidekick Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh. It is you will note very blokey; Times Radio presenter Ayesha Hazarika has done regular shows in Edinburgh but not this year.

Iain Dale has conducted a wide array of interviews across the political spectrum – Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf, Penny Mordaunt (who proclaimed herself ‘hammer of the Nats’), Jeremy Corbyn – with class and skill. He pushed Sturgeon on what happened in the SNP under her leadership and her responsibility for it, so much so that one member of the audience shouted out ‘move on’.

Steve Richards provides a different approach, drawing upon a vast knowledge of UK politics and history rather than relying on guests. He knows how to draw upon the audience’s interests and views, and works with them to improvise the content, changing tack and material depending on what arises. It is no accident that Dale and Richards are now regular features at the Fringe.

A bigger challenge comes with quality control, and the impact, if any, on politics. Salmond for example has spent recent years in the twilight as a semi-pariah after his imperial reign. He has refused to take any real responsibility or show any insight into his moral descent and the consequences of his actions. SNPers Kate Forbes and Joanna Cherry, Labour’s Henry McLeish, Tory David Davis and former Commons Speaker John Bercow, have all been happy to share an Edinburgh platform with Salmond. In the past week he has ventured forth a range of opinions including calling his successor Nicola Sturgeon a ‘sad, almost reduced figure’ – words which perhaps could also, or alternatively, be employed to describe himself.

A couple of observations flow from this. The first is the unaccountability of comments and observations in entertainment spaces like those currently being offered in Edinburgh. Hence politicians and public figures can say nearly anything they like, with little to no comeback, scrutiny or fact checking. Hence SNP MP Joanna Cherry could in the past few days fume at length about the Scottish Greens (the party that literally keeps the SNP in power in Scotland) calling them ‘totalitarian’, ‘anti-free speech’ and even ‘anti-gay’ – comments that are clearly contentious and open to counter charge. But all these remarks were reported unchecked as news headlines – and mostly without challenge.

The second is what this set of changes say about Edinburgh at Festival time. It is part of the evolution of public discourse which began over 20 years ago with the explosion of Book Festivals as a place of political discussion. Some of this was generational, then aided by widespread middle-class, middle-aged disgust at Tony Blair and New Labour. It led then to comments celebrating ‘the democratisation of Book Festivals’ and that ‘Book Festivals are where politics happens rather than Parliament and street protests’.

But Book Festivals are selective, controlled, commercialised spaces (underlined by the Baillie Gifford-Greta Thunberg controversy and writer protest this week). They are not primarily about civil society or the state of the body politic – or the health or not of the agora. They are about shifting and promoting product, and are supported by an affluent, older constituency unrepresentative of the wider public – disproportionately people with voice, influence and existing access. And in the past couple of years this trend has broken out into the Edinburgh Fringe and become conspicuous with one commentator noting: ‘This degrades the Edinburgh Festival. The Fringe should be about art. Politics is not art.’

Edinburgh and the Elite Capture of Culture, Politics and Public Life

Third, there is a deleterious effect on the public sphere across the UK and particularly in Scotland. The flowering of a set of selective discussions in Edinburgh is related to, and is inevitably, a judgement on the failure of major media broadcasters and other platforms. The rise of the political actor at Edinburgh Festival time is filling a vacuum and meeting unmet need as an audience looks for political discourse and insights that they cannot find elsewhere.

This is presented as a widening of the public debate and politics. What is not to like – it is asked – of politics coming to Edinburgh, when the world comes to the city? One prominent cultural player said to me in defence of the situation: ‘Edinburgh Book Festival shows the breadth and diversity of public life and debate in Scotland.’ The problem with these assumptions are many. For a start there is the setting. The Oxbridge-isation of comedy and and other shows; the exorbitant costs of putting on events and for affordable accommodation for performers, means that deep pockets are now required of a large part of the audience. 

Edinburgh at Festival time is part of the toffification of UK culture, politics and public life, and part of the problem. Those who have the most voice, status, privilege and connection decant to Edinburgh for a month to talk to each other and to reinforce their own assumptions about how liberal and enlightened they are. 

The occasional ‘outsider’ such as Darren McGarvey proves the point, being very much now the insider trading as the professional outsider (or outsider granted the status of an insider). With whatever laudable intentions, everyone can feel that they are inclusive and open. Meanwhile a version of politics and public debate is being promoted which is not only exclusive and exclusionary it is deliberately – structurally and organisationally – contributing to our broken politics that has been captured by wealth, status and connections.

Fourth, these Edinburgh Festival developments raise the issue of why BBC Scotland and STV have not considered championing discussions, conversations and exchanges which have a wider political and civic value? Since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, a near quarter century ago, both the BBC and STV have viewed politics and how they cover it as focused primarily on specialist programmes with minority interest audiences (the graveyard slot of the now gone BBC Newsnight Scotland being the most obvious example). 

One predictable way that the BBC could address the above, would be to extend their Edinburgh Festival coverage into the political and do a Glastonbury on it – recording and capturing the selective conversations and presenting them as their contribution to public service broadcasting. This would reproduce this narrow bandwidth of political discourse as something universal, without addressing its partialness and missing voices, conversations, and subjects. The Glastonbury-isation of political and public debate would exasperate existing divisions of who has voice and who does not and contribute to our ongoing crisis of democracy. 

Edinburgh is still in Scotland even at Festival Time (despite appearances!)

Fifth, the above has consequences for how Scottish political discourse evolves and is represented. Media presenters as skilled as Iain Dale and Steve Richards understand that Scotland is different and know their Scottish politics. But the rise of Edinburgh as a backdrop for political conversations at a time when the city is filled with visitors from outside Scotland, alongside the significant profile of Westminster-focused commentators, cannot help but diminish the Scottish body politic.

When this is added to the failure of imagination and inability of BBC Scotland and STV over nearly 25 years to widen how they frame the political debate, including their conspicuous failure in 2014 and subsequently, this amounts to a retrenchment of what is politically possible to talk about in public in Scotland. One where Scotland as a communicative and social space has been constrained and curtailed.

Finally, assessing the cumulative effect of all of this has a major impact on what we view as politics, how we do political and public conversations, and consequences for the future evolution of politics in the UK and Scotland. 

Overall, the verdict must be that Edinburgh at Festival time as a place for political conversation is neither healthy, enlightening or democratic. Rather this is about the championing of a politics about and for insiders, talking a comfortable insider language and set of values, and presenting a select menu of subjects which an affluent, older audience find themselves sympathetic to and not threatened by.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a divided society, with a broken economic and social order, alongside an atrophied democracy and increasingly corrupt politics. This state of affairs is one where mainly the over 65s have driven Brexit and the logic of the Tory Party’s descent into right-wing populism, and the best that can be said of Edinburgh is that it is showcasing the liberal version of the affluent, aged selectorate.

Edinburgh’s newfound status as a city of political conversations occurring outside official parliamentary spaces over the summer reinforces the retreat of public space and platforms; the hollowing out of the public sphere, and retreat of the very idea of the public as an active agency creating and shaping our own collective future as a society. It is about contestment of what constitutes public conversation, voice and legitimacy – from the rules of selection and omission which go on in Festivals, to the claims and counter-claims about cancellation and censorship seen in the controversies over Joanna Cherry at The Stand and Graham Linehan at Leith Arches.

Overall, the evolution of Edinburgh as a Festival City is of the public reduced from any aspiration of being empowered citizens. This is about tightly managed, controlled corporate space masquerading as public space and the agora. Consumers who are invited into a one-hour book event or special discussion, where the views of politicians and public figures are packaged for consumption, with the audience allowed a carefully controlled small amount of time to make observations or a short point.

Where will this end? The rise of politics as entertainment and show business – and for the most at a superficial level – is not a positive trend. It is about the continued middle class, middle aged, affluent capture of UK politics and public conversation with all the resulting disastrous consequences we see around us. This is the personalisation of politics and of self-reverence, where politics is typically presented as about petty feuds and vendettas, with originality and fresh thinking about genuine policy ideas that might improve things being excluded.

This is a politics reduced to retro-culture and nostalgia which haunts every aspect of UK life. If it continues, as politicians’ muscle in on entertainment and boundaries blur we will see the acceleration of the changing nature of what a politician is and not in a good way.

This ranges from the emergence of the performative politician such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, to politicians crossing over into media as presenters on Talk TV and GB News such as Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg respectively, and comedians standing for national office as in Italy, Brazil and Ukraine. Just because Zelenskyy turned out to be a national hero don’t expect such an outturn here. It did after all take a Russian invasion to turn Zelenskyy into a hero!