The Hay Festival finished last night. The previous week it was blackmailed into ditching one of its sponsors, the wealth management group Baillie Gifford. A climate divestment activist group, Fossil Free Books, asked writers attending Hay to de-platform themselves in protest at Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship, because it invests two per cent of its funds in fossil fuel-related assets. Some of the high-profile guests who refused to perform at the book festival also conflated this issue with the Gaza conflict, thus creating an almighty virtue signal that could probably be seen from space.
Charlotte Church made a particularly sanctimonious statement, saying she was boycotting “in protest of the artwashing and greenwashing that is apparent in this sponsorship. Your art festival is not more important than the lives of Palestinian children and the future of healthy ecosystems on earth”, she wrote, somewhat hysterically, on social media. “If the art world continues to take this dirty money, we all become complicit.”
