The Edinburgh international book festival opens on Saturday. I will be there, but it will go ahead without its headline event, one that would have seen 3,000 climate activists and readers gather to hear Greta Thunberg speak. The environmental campaigner cancelled just over a week before she was due to appear, after a piece in the Scottish online investigative journal the Ferret pointed out that the festival’s main sponsor, fund manager Baillie Gifford, invests in companies connected with fossil fuels. “Greenwashing efforts by the fossil fuel industry, including sponsorship of cultural events, allow them to keep the social licence to continue operating,” she said in a statement.
It points to a wider narrative: the story of many cultural organisations across the UK over the past decade has been an increasing reliance on sponsorship and donors – especially in England, where private funding has been touted by Tory ministers as the answer to the ideologically motivated austerity cuts of 2010 onwards, a situation that has become more acute since the depredations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The result, though, has been problem piled upon ethical problem. Some organisations have found themselves rapidly untangling themselves from Russian money. (Tate, for example, severed ties last March with sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, removing the former donor from an honorary position after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)
