Baillie Gifford and Edinburgh Book Festival end partnership after activist pressure

The Edinburgh International Book Festival has ended a 20-year partnership with its lead sponsor Baillie Gifford after the withdrawal of several authors and threats of disruption from activists, prompting the festival’s chair to warn that “funding for the arts is now in a perilous position”.

The announcement follows a similar move last week by Hay Festival, which suspended its sponsorship from the £225bn asset manager after boycotts from speakers and performers over the Edinburgh-based private partnership’s purported links to Israel and the fossil fuel industry.

Allan Little, chair of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, warned on Thursday that “the future of festivals like ours — and all of these benefits these events bring to authors and readers alike — is in jeopardy.”

An open letter from lobby group Fossil Free Books earlier this month had called on Baillie Gifford to “divest from the fossil fuel industry and from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”.

Staff at Hay Festival were being individually targeted on social media and accused of complicity in genocide, according to people familiar with the situation.

Jenny Niven, chief executive of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said the pressure on the team and their colleagues at Baillie Gifford “has simply become intolerable”. The festival is scheduled for August.

Fossil Free Books said it welcomed the news, adding it was “grateful” to the festival “for showing leadership and listening to its authors and workers”.

Baillie Gifford is a long-standing investor in companies seeking to drive the transition to clean energy and holds large positions in the likes of electric-car maker Tesla and Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt.

Only 2 per cent of its clients’ money is invested in companies with some business related to fossil fuels, compared with the market average of 11 per cent. The firm is a large investor in multinational tech companies, including Amazon, Nvidia and Meta.

Fossil Free Books has said some of Baillie Gifford’s holdings — among them Cemex, Cisco Systems and Booking Holdings — have been condemned by rights organisations for their business involvement in Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

Baillie Gifford has said these are multinational companies whose operations in the occupied Palestinian territories are small in the context of their overall business and no sanctions prohibit them from doing business there.

Nick Thomas, a partner at Baillie Gifford and a prominent patron of the arts, said: “The activists’ anonymous campaign of coercion and misinformation has put intolerable pressure on authors and the festival community . . . we hold the activists squarely responsible for the inhibiting effect their action will have on funding for the arts.”

He added: “The assertion that we have significant amounts of money in the occupied Palestinian territories is offensively misleading.”

Thomas said: “Demanding divestment from these global companies, used by millions of people around the world, is unreasonable and serves no purpose. Much as it would be unreasonable to demand authors boycott Instagram or stop selling books on Amazon.”

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Baillie Gifford’s support for the Edinburgh International Book Festival began in 2004 as a philanthropic initiative by its partners. The firm took over as lead sponsor from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2013 — a “six-figure sum” each year, according to a person familiar with the situation.

In recent years Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship has focused on a programme that supports Scottish school students to attend the festival free of charge, meet authors and receive a free book.

Organisations with alleged links to Israel have come under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists in recent months as the country has been accused of genocide in a case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.

The accusation was levelled over Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 36,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials. Israel has rejected the claims of genocide as entirely false.

The offensive was launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.