This year, we won’t be covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).
It’s not because the limited gardens and impersonal halls of Edinburgh Futures Institute are a downgrade on the splendid tented village that occupied Charlotte Square each year. It’s not because the move away has left Charlotte Square an unused, unused New Town space, whilst making the Festival just one more venue amongst the Old Town Fringe hyper-concentration.
These are damaging factors which reduce the EIBF’s standing, but they aren’t fatal. Maybe the festival’s organisers can iterate their new home towards something a little more special each year. Maybe something better will arrive in Charlotte Square and make that barren, manicured green square work for the city.
None of this is why we’re not covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival. After all, this year’s programme still offers close encounters with generational talents such as Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell and Hanif Kureishi, whilst amplifying invaluable voices, from Najwan Darwish to Juma Xipaia. One of my favourite science fiction authors, Peter F. Hamilton, will be popping up, and the Fun Loving Crime Writers will doubtless put on a cracking concert. The Festival is less than what it was, but it’s not without merit.
We won’t be stopping by because what was a jewel in Edinburgh’s cultural crown, a marquee event staging some of the best and brightest writers both locally and from around the world, has been reduced to an cliqueish gathering intent on preaching to the choir.
How could it be otherwise after two rounds of capitulation to a small but loud minority who will brook no opposition to their perceived ideas of virtue? Jenny Linsday and Darren McGarvey aren’t the only writers previously found under the canvas in Charlotte Square, and now conspicuously absent despite publishing best sellers since. Her crime? Being the wrong kind of feminist. His? Presumably making the middle-class cultural cabal in charge uncomfortable with hard truths about Scotland’s left behind.
Even if you are horrified by a writer’s ideas, that’s no reason to exclude them from a celebration of the written word. Disagree with them by all means, place them into debate with others who hold opposite views, but deplatforming? That’s the way of cowardice.
Those who think they will win a battle of ideas by pushing their ‘enemies’ out of the cultural strongholds of the middle-classes should think again. The history of censorship is a history of ‘forbidden’ ideas becoming more powerful than their enemies’ feared before proscription.
One wonders, do these bold literary soldiers refuse to pay their taxes to a government which exports arms to Israel, or that licenses fossil fuel companies in the North Sea? Do they insist on communication by snail mail because of a smartphone industry reliant on the destruction of the natural world in pursuit of rare metals?
If there are one or two perfect hermits amongst this noisy throng, I still see plenty swarming over social media – and the less we say on the ethics underpinning the world’s dominant social platforms, the better.
Of course, human beings are hypocrites, every single one of us, and hypocrisy is no reason that a single person calling for deplatforming or divestment should not be invited. However, kowtowing to their demands leads to one destination and one only: irrelevance.
Whether severing an irreplaceable source of funding from one of the few major companies interested in supporting culture and education, or thought-policing your line-up to the exclusion of great thinkers and writers, the outcome is a monstrous act of self-harm.
The result is a smaller, more insular festival, lacking any power to inform individuals or change public discourse. The public, meanwhile, will continue to make best-sellers of the authors deemed untouchable, whilst Baillie Gifford will take the money not spend on the public good, and sink into the most profitable investment fund going. What a victory.
Surely, the Festival organisers must see the irony in highlighting ‘Repair’ as a theme of the 2025 programme, and in booking philosopher A C Grayling to wax lyrical on ‘Disagreeing Agreeably?’
That would be the same A C Grayling who labelled Jeremy Corbyn a “Tory-enabling lickspittle”.
Has the good progressor disagreed quite disagreeably on the ‘wrong’ topics, his invitation – we all know – would have been lost in the post.
It’s impossible to conceive of today’s festival featuring a nightly cabaret of the unexpected, as it did pre-pandemic. ‘Unbound’, brainchild of then Festival second-in-command, now Director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, Roland Gulliver. Lighting the touch paper of talent, he sat back and let the Spiegeltent explode.
What do we have instead this year? A cocktail masterclass with actor Sam Heughan. Need I say more?
Doubtless, slashed budgets are in part responsible for the Festival’s notably polite programme, but one suspects the fear of ‘wrong speak’ on stage is another motivating factor.
All of this being said, I am not prepared to write off the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This world-famous celebration of the written word retains too much potential to educate and entertain. Edinburgh’s claim to be a world capital of the arts would be damaged without it. Yet, until its organisers find their spines and push back against forces seeking to remake it as a literary censor rather than a celebrant, it will descend further and further into impotence and irrelevance.
For who will suffer from the Festival’s massive funding cuts and the inevitable reduction in free school tickets and community work? Not the wealthy or their children – that being the majority of the authors with sufficient popularity to make their threatened boycotts matter.
Whose mind will be changed by events which only promote ‘acceptable’ ideas without challenge? What chance of discovery when the programme removes any opportunity for festival goers to encounter anything new or dangerous?
What point in reporting on events, which will report words from an author they can probably get from social media, or amplify predictable, ‘safe’ opinions on the state of the world? Why celebrate an Edinburgh International Book Festival which, for now, seems intent on its own destruction?
Such is the price of playing things safe.
Well, books are dangerous: they contain ideas. The Edinburgh International Book Festival would do well to remember and embrace that. If it does, we’ll be back.
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