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.)
Or take the case of the Sackler Trust, for years a massive donor to the arts in the UK. The charity was fatally tarnished by the fact that its fortune derived from Sackler family members’ ownership of Purdue Pharma, whose painkiller OxyContin has been at the centre of the US opioids-addiction crisis. (There’s a faint irony, perhaps, in the fact that the writer who unravelled how the Sacklers used culture to cleanse their reputation, Patrick Radden Keefe, won the UK’s foremost nonfiction award – the Baillie Gifford prize.)
It’s too easy to say that museums and galleries shouldn’t have accepted money from such sources. But hidden facts do emerge; situations change; the boundaries of the acceptable shift. The UK in general had been ultra-welcoming to Russian and Putin-adjacent wealth for years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so it’s not surprising that arts organisations didn’t go out on a limb by boycotting Russian wealth when starved of public money. The facts about OxyContin and its connection to the cultural world became well known only through Keefe’s reporting, and ties between museums and the Sackler Trust severed only because of the vigorous campaigning of artist Nan Goldin and fellow activists. There are many cases, too, about which people would disagree – such as the ethics of accepting money deriving from the gambling site Bet365, as the Courtauld Gallery and Tate have recently done. Once upon a time, it was deemed fine for cultural organisations to take sponsorship from tobacco giants and fossil fuel extractors. Those days are past – though, bewilderingly, only just for the British Museum, which took until this summer to end its agreement with BP.
The case of Baillie Gifford and the Edinburgh international book festival, however, seems to me to be more complex. Baillie Gifford, which manages the pension fund of, for example, MSPs, is not a Purdue Pharma, or a BP. According to the company’s figures, of the £223bn (as of 31 December 2022) it invests on behalf of its clients, just 2% is in companies that get 5% or more of their revenue from oil- and gas-related activities. Those companies include, for instance, Tesco, because it has forecourt petrol stations. It also includes the Danish energy company Ørsted, which has pioneered transition to wind power – but has been recently mandated by the Danish government to recommission three old coal-powered plants in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Baillie Gifford also invests in companies pioneering alternatives to fossil-fuel energy, such as the Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt, and Tesla. Many observers, in fact, would consider them to be pretty responsible. Nick Barley, the director of the Edinburgh international book festival, said that despite his respect for Thunberg’s decision, and alignment with her position on the climate crisis, he believes that “Baillie Gifford is not the enemy of Greta Thunberg and climate activists”.
However, Baillie Gifford does invest in some oil and gas companies – notably in the Brazilian company Petrobras, one of the world’s biggest polluters. It also has holdings in a scattering of companies such as PTT and Valeura, which extract gas in Thailand and Turkey respectively. Baillie Gifford’s report this summer on its emerging markets fund (not one that MSPs’ pensions are invested in) noted Petrobras’s “stellar results”: the fund is worth £709m and Petrobras accounts for 5.4% of it. No mention, naturally, of plans by the state-run company to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon, against which activists have been protesting this week. So where are the limits of the acceptable?
Thunberg’s action has not, so far, precipitated a mass withdrawal of other authors from this year’s festival. But it has led to an open letter to the festival signed by writers including Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Nikesh Shukla and Raymond Antrobus, demanding that Baillie Gifford divest its clients’ money from fossil fuel companies. If it does not do so, the letter calls on all authors to boycott next year’s festival unless it finds new sponsorship. The limits of the acceptable are indeed shifting: rightly.
From Baillie Gifford’s point of view, it’s bewildering to have been thinking of yourselves as responsible corporate citizens one minute, only to be cast as the bad guys the next (though does anyone ever think of themselves as “the bad guys”?). Supporting events such as Edinburgh, Hay, Wimbledon and the Borders book festivals isn’t part of some devilish greenwashing masterplan to make themselves look good, fund managers say. They consider themselves to be at the sharp end of actively helping the transition to net zero, in all its messy reality.
It is easy to see why Thunberg has taken the position that she has: progress, historically, on issues from civil rights to women’s suffrage has been achieved by absolutists, those who have seen the world with peculiar clarity and sharpness rather than in agonised, multiple shades of grey. But in the meantime, the book festival is left to sweep up the debris, and arts leaders in Edinburgh and beyond to the endless daily worry about where on earth the next untarnished penny’s to come from.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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