Hay Festival drops Baillie Gifford, Attention now Turns to Edinburgh Book Festival
In response to the demands made by Fossil Free Books, Hay Festival has announced it will suspend its sponsorship from Baillie Gifford. Authors have withdrawn from Hay Festival, including Dawn Butler MP, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti CBE, Farhana Yamin, Grace Blakeley, Nish Kumar, Charlotte Church, Noreen Masud and others. A statement from the Hay Festival CEO Julie Finch read: “In light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw, we have taken the decision to suspend our sponsorship from Baillie Gifford.
Our first priority is to our audience and our artists. Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives. Hay Festival Global is a charity. We are grateful to all those artists, partners and audiences who engage and contribute to the conversation, on stage and off. We look forward to welcoming you this fortnight, in person and online.”
Fossil Free Books have said: “We invite book workers everywhere to join 200+ signatories and sign our open letter renewing our call for Baillie Gifford to divest from the fossil fuel industry and from companies that profit from Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.” Sign here: fossilfreebooks.org/baillie-giffor
As Fossil Free Books explains Baillie Gifford invests between £2.5 and £5 billion in the fossil fuel industry[1] and is one of the main investors in illegal Israeli settlements according to NGOs, as well as investing nearly £10billion in companies linked to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries.[2]
800+ authors and book workers – including publishers and booksellers – signed Fossil Free Books’ statement[3] calling on asset manager and arts sponsor Baillie Gifford to divest from fossil fuel companies and companies that profit from Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.
There is now huge pressure on Jenny Niven, the incoming director of the Edinburgh Book Festival. Last year a number of writers, including Greta Thunberg pulled out of the book festival and we can expect that number to increase massively this year. Niven has some choices to make: avoid a PR disaster now or face a writers and readers boycott this summer.
As I wrote last year (‘Future Stories and Literary Strikes‘):
“What seems clear is this issue isn’t going away. With all the talk of de-platforming and ‘cancel culture’ what is at play is the removal of the labour of presence. The commodity here is not the book its the author, and a literary strike has huge potential to cause disruption.”
As Fossil Free Books puts it in their response to the Hay Festival announcement: “Nine UK literary festivals and one prize are still sponsored by Baillie Gifford. Until they divest we continue call on authors to withdraw from or take creative action at these events. We call on all remaining Baillie Gifford-sponsored festivals to join our call for the firm to divest.”
A fantastic victory gained through brilliant campaigning by Fossil Free Books and a reflection of just how much the tide has turned in the struggle against Israeli apartheid and its enablers. The outrage at what’s happening in Gaza combined with the awareness that ecocide beckons for all of us unless things radically change has been given a huge confidence boost by this victory.
Now those forces like David Greig desperately trying to maintain and defend the indefensible status quo must recognise they are on the wrong side of history. His comments in particular recently have been a disgrace. To talk of the major concern right now being “ the performing arts in Scotland are on their knees “ smacks of utter disregard for the physical conditions of the people of Gaza right now with thousands slaughtered, starved and traumatised. That way of expressing the situation right now is colonial entitlement writ large and a pompous accusation that this cultural boycott, years in its development with inspiration from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and growing stronger every day, is “ childish “ deserves nothing but contempt. That statement should be withdrawn and apologised for.
A culture that can only be maintained by collusion with and support for investors in genocide and ecocide has nothing to offer humanity at this crucial time. The rising groundswell demanding radical change are finding artistic expression in the worldwide cultural intifada and are using such tactics of mass pressure so effectively towards further victories going forward this year.
Tam Dean Burn. An eloquent and fitting response. Thank you
Your unquestioning acceptance of the absurd claim that Baillie Gifford has anything to do with what’s happening in Gaza undermines your entire comment. Dig into the activists’ footnotes and you discover that the investments in question include…Amazon and Booking.com. If you think BG selling Amazon shares will stop the Israeli government then I don’t know what to tell you.
Perhaps it was the £5.4 billion investment in Nvidia, currently building Israel’s most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer designed to “choose targets for air strikes and organise wartime logistics” which concentrated the minds of the organisers of the Hay Festival. Their decision to reject a sponsor which profits from such a company is admirable.
NVIDIA makes GPUs, computer processors, which it sells to computer manufacturers. Claiming that they are responsible for how the IDF uses computers that use NVIDIA processors is like blaming steel manufacturers for gun crime. Moreover, NVIDIA is such a large component of the index that literally any investment you make in a passive tracker fund, eg, any workplace pension, will have a sizeable exposure to NVIDIA.
Admirable and appropriate.
The very premise of this protest is absurd. Baillie Gifford is one of the least fossil fuel exposed investors in the UK and is a major investor in companies driving the climate transition like Tesla. The claim that Bailie Gifford is one of the “main investors” in Israeli settlements is so absurd another it’s not worth dignifying with a rebuttal. The childish and entitled signatories would do well to consider the corrosive impact they are having on the arts by attacking a rare source of significant funding.
Spoiler: Tesla is not a company ‘driving the climate transition’. It makes expensive cars, is owned by the despot-loving Space Karen and has a poor record on workers’ rights.
I disagree, but that’s tangential to my main point. As growth investor, Baillie Gifford invests in a large number of companies driving positive change and has almost negligible exposure to fossil fuels and zero exposure to Israeli operations in Gaza. The premise on which the activists’ argument rests is simply wrong. If the activists making these claims had done their research into Baillie Gifford in good faith they would have discovered this.
You choose the same descriptions as David Greig- childish and entitled – in reference to people doing all they can to stop the genocide and ecocide. On the day after one the most horrific attacks of the barbaric and criminal last seven months that is contemptible. Childish? When children in tents are being beheaded by bombs from fighter jets? How dare you and him?!
All you pose as a positive for BG is their extensive investment in Musk, the most childish and entitled of the billionaires driving us towards disaster. Musk got down early to Israel to express his support for Netanyahu and his war criminal cronies. Then Musk complained that the police in Germany let protesters at his Tesla plant off too easily, obviously in comparison to their thuggery against activists for Palestine like those you smear here.
And here’s an example of the BG complicity with Israeli apartheid- https://www.bailliegifford.com/en/uk/individual-investors/insights/ic-article/2022-q3-trust-45-trip-notes-tel-aviv-10014282/
You may note a word missing from this drooling love letter to lawless barbarism- Palestine.
Baillie Gifford are up to their necks in everything that’s wrong about this world, raking in at all costs for their grubby moneybags investors and attempting to covering their greed caked arses with some crumbs to the arts.
But the tide is clearly turning with more and more people across the globe outraged at what’s going on and seeing the connections between the Israeli/US genocide of defenceless Palestinians and the ecocide threatening us all.
Change is coming and it’s getting clearer who’s choosing to side with that genocide and ecocide because that change threatens their colonially entitled culture. Edinburgh seems to be right at the heart of that and good on Bella for taking it on.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is terrible—I’m not disputing that. My point is that your anger towards Baillie Gifford is entirely misdirected. The reason the demands above are so ridiculous—and I repeat, childish and entitled—is not because activists are wrong to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza, but because they’ve set up a straw man interpretation of Baillie Gifford’s investment activities. It’s like screaming in the face of someone you’ve never met because you think they believe X, when they don’t. The discourse around BG’s arts funding is strange because there are extreme emotions on one side with very little substance behind them. The citations provided by the signatories above are misleading and written on the basis of very superficial and bad faith research into BG’s investment activities.
With reference to your citation, I’m curious to hear where you think BG’s complicity in ‘genocide and ecocide’ can be found. Israel does indeed have several innovative growth businesses, including some important biotechs and a website design tool, but attempting to link their activities to the Israeli government’s war in Gaza is tenuous. America also conducts deplorable foreign policy decisions, but it’s not tenable to refuse to invest in, say, Airbnb because of the actions of the US government.
Finally, in reference to your sentence “attempting to covering their greed caked arses with some crumbs to the arts”, I can only roll my eyes. BG doesn’t have to give anything to the arts, but for many years it has done so because quite a few of its partners have humanities backgrounds and like to see the arts in Edinburgh thrive. This is something they can be proud of. Personally I hope it can continue, but it’s sad to see people direct their (quite understandable) anger towards Israel’s government at a pretty decent local asset manager that does a good job supporting Scotland’s arts scene.
Did you read the article I sent? It’s directly from the horse’s mouth and lays bare BG collusion with apartheid. Here’s a few quotes-
World-renowned higher education, a diverse culture and the Talpiot programme also contribute to the country’s success, making it an attractive place to invest.
Another key part of the startup ecosystem is the Talpiot, the Israel Defence Forces’ development programme for the best and brightest of the country’s physicists and mathematicians. It’s been a nursery for many prominent companies. Israel’s sizeable defence budget accounts for its leading position in fields such as cyber security, radar technology and computer vision – artificial intelligence that lets machines ‘read’ images.
* the very same AI that’s been targeting Palestinian children in tents.
Edinburgh Worldwide Investment Trust (EWIT) contains several Israeli companies, and we’re looking at others. Existing holdings include CyberArk, a software security company, JFrog, which provides tools for software developers, and Ceva, a chip designer.
*As I said they’re up to their necks in apartheid as they admit here.
And lastly and almost hilariously if things weren’t so tragic -the lauding of a previous Zionist war criminal…
Which reminds me of a nice quote someone told me, from the late, great Shimon Peres, a former Israeli prime minister, that partly explains where these promising businesses come from:
“We’re a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.”
I do agree though that what exists now can and will be changed for the better but at such enormous cost for the Palestinian people. Baillie Gifford are not part of that change but they must divest now from genocide and ecocide.
In response to your comment below (which I can’t respond to directly for some reason):
I read the article. It refers to three Israeli investments by name (CyberArk, JFrog, and Ceva), which appear to be software and tech companies. The article mentions that IDF funding helps support the Israeli start up scene, but this doesn’t mean that every Israeli company is involved with the IDF’s actions in Gaza, still less that foreign shareholders of Israeli software companies have anything to do with Israel’s war.
On divestment, what exactly would this achieve? Divesting from Israeli companies involves selling the shares to somebody else. Why would an Israeli company care if a particular Scottish asset manager has sold their shares or not? Why would the next shareholder be any more or less accountable for Israel’s actions? And there’s no reason at all why the Israeli government would care or act any differently either way.
Divestment had a huge impact on the South African apartheid regime, exactly the same forces are at play with the Israeli apartheid regime. You must be aware of these historical examples?i
Disinvestment from lending directly to a foreign government involved in apartheid is one thing, but selling the shares of a private company that happens to exist in said country to some other shareholder is completely different. Not only does it have no impact on the company, still less its government, there isn’t even any compelling moral reason to do so, since public companies in the civilian sphere do not bear moral responsibility for their government’s actions. And their shareholders in Scotland, ie BG’s clients (predominantly pensions funds), certainly do not. So there is neither a practical nor a moral case.
One appropriate course of action would be to protest Israel’s government directly. But forcing British book festivals to turn down funding from Scottish asset managers who invest a very small proportion of their assets in Israeli software companies is not.
You disagree about what? You don’t agree that Tesla makes expensive cars? You don’t agree that Elon Musk is its largest shareholder? You don’t agree that it has a poor record on workers’ rights?
Unless you can justify your attack on signatories as childish and entitled, withdraw it or there’ll be no further exchanges with me.
To be honest, such an attack is wholly unjustified and makes me sick to my stomach so withdraw it or I’m not spending any further time on dealing with your sophistry.
There is a practical and moral imperative to demanding disinvestment by Scottish pension funds in Israeli apartheid 1. Because that’s what’s being asked for by Palestinian civil society in its Boycott Divestment and Sanction ( BDS ) campaign which is proving increasingly successful as a non-violent direct action means to offer solidarity and pressure the Israeli state and its allies around the world 2. Because demanding such divestment has long been a tactic of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and has had considerable success and a vital need for more.
So this particular campaign demanding divestment by BG is part of a wide campaign that if you genuinely had any concern for what’s happening in Gaza or indeed the planet you would join.
The question always begs that if it’s such a small amount in BGs portfolio why don’t they do the right thing and divest that small amount?
Your point amounts to saying that divestment is necessary because BDS say it is. You haven’t addressed my explanation of why divestment from public equities has no impact even on the companies in question, still less on the military policies of the government of the country in which they happen to reside.
Since there is no case for divestment from Israeli equities full stop, it doesn’t matter in what proportion those assets are held.
Now, it would be a different matter if BG were for some reason loaning money to Israel’s defence industry. But it does not – it appears to own some shares in growth companies building software and doing biotech research.
Hence my frustration with the signatories. They don’t understand what it is they’re calling on BG to do, they unquestioningly accept the assertions made by some activists about the nature of BG’s investments, and they harm Scotland’s arts scene by misleadingly claiming a link between BG and Israel and demanding divestment. I’m not questioning their motives, I’m criticising their choice of target.
If it had no effect, you wouldn’t be here slagging it off Christopher. No one kicks a dead dog.
Public opinion matters. We have a multi-billion pound industry busy manufacturing consent for the murder of children and the murder of our planet’s biosphere. Those clever, clever billionaires would not be spending money on altering public opinion if it didn’t matter.
Aye exactly Wul, what’s abundantly apparent by every denigration is the power of cultural boycott and BDS generally. It is quite remarkable how such a simple, non-violent tactic can have such a big effect. That’s why Israel hates it so much. We saw it last year with Greta saying no, I’m withdrawing my labour and striking against the way this system is set up. And now, since Hay was a tipping point and obviously a victory we see every conceivable argument being put up, and increasingly in cahoots with mainstream media, to try to nullify that power. This is a key element in the ever-growing worldwide cultural intifada against genocide and ecocide.
There are really two simple points here.
1. BG is not a significant investor in Israel or fossil fuels. Fossil Free Books’ claims are seriously misleading. The stocks they mention by name (NVIDIA, Meta aka Facebook, Airbnb, Booking.com) generate negligible amounts of revenue from Israel, and even then, certainly have nothing to do with the IDF or its activities. The entire premise on which the divestment debate rests is false.
2. But even if BG were, for some reason, a major investor in Israel, selling shares would have absolutely no impact on the companies in question, and certainly no impact on the decisions of the Israeli government. Why would BG selling the shares of an Israeli biotech cause Netanyahu to change his mind on Gaza? These companies are not looking for new capital, and the new shareholders would by definition be OK with holding Israeli shares. Divestment can make sense in specific contexts, like if BG were providing primary capital to Israeli defence companies. But that is clearly not the case here.
The reason I’m taking the time to respond to all of this is because, firstly, it’s worth addressing claims that are misleading, and secondly, because denying Scottish arts festivals funding for no good reason sets a damaging precedent. Corporate sponsors are already lacking in the arts, and BG is unusual in that it’s a private company owned by local partners who commendably are willing to support local arts and culture. It would be a shame to see such sources of funding dry up because of misleading claims, even if well-intentioned.
Hi Christopher – thanks for your comment. Divestment away from fossil fuels has been a major movement for some time now as you may be aware and the Fossil Free Books campaign has had a notable victory at the Hay Festival. In the coming months many more writers will be withdrawing from the Edinburgh Book Festival and more pressure will come on them to drop Baillie Gifford as a sponsor.
In terms of your claim that Baillie Gifford is not a major investor in fossil fuels their assets include shares worth:
$524m in British fossil fuel giant, Shell
$267m in Norwegian oil company, Equinor
$77m in Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation
$726m in Brazilian oil company, Petrobras
$911m in Japanese coal company, Reliance Industries
Thanks for your response. The Hay decision is not evidence that divestment works, it’s evidence that you can force book festivals to drop funding if you threaten them enough. Divestment itself, ie BG selling its shares to someone else, serves no purpose for the reasons stated earlier.
Thanks for your data on specific fossil fuel investments. These should be seen in the context of % of total assets, where they are dwarfed by investments in renewable technologies like heat pumps, wind generation, EV chargers, green hydrogen, etc, ie the sort of growth investments BG is generally known for (outside the activist community). Ownership of some fossil fuel shares may be the result of specific client mandates requiring diversification, and the debate here requires some nuance – eg, owning fossil fuel assets allows institutions to engage with management on the long term shift towards renewables. The climate transition won’t happen overnight, and the existing energy companies have a role to play.
Ultimately only 2% of BG’s assets have exposure to fossil fuels, compared to 9% of the overall market, which is what you’d get with a standard index fund. So to claim that BG is a major investor in fossil fuels is misleading. The threats that the Edinburgh Book Festival has sadly faced as a result of misinformation on this point are also deeply regrettable.
The Edinburgh Book Festival has received no threats. The writers have simply stated they would not attend. The boycott has been 100% peaceful.
I think you misunderstand the nature of the predicament we face.
Have a look at their statement. It’s clear that they cut ties not because they agree with the activists’ unfounded claims but because they were getting so much abuse that it became practically impossible to continue.
Their statement said:
“Undermining the long-term future of charitable organisations such as book festivals is not the right way to bring about change.
We speak to all our supporters about these complex issues and continue to believe that Baillie Gifford is part of the solution in transitioning towards a more sustainable world and that the firm operates in line with our Ethical Fundraising policy.”
It’s a great shame for the Scottish arts scene, and it will have served no purpose other than to appease a minority of activists.
I read the statement. It was bizarre.
“…..Corporate sponsors are already lacking in the arts,…”
Good! Hope the door disnae skelp thur erses on the wey oot!
Edinburgh Book Festival have now severed their ties with Baillie Gifford.
Full statement here:
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/news/an-update-on-our-partnership-with-baillie-gifford