Hay Festival suspends sponsorship from Baillie Gifford after protests

Hay Festival has suspended its sponsorship from Baillie Gifford, after boycotts from speakers and performers over the Edinburgh-based asset manager’s purported links to Israel and the fossil fuel industry. 

Julie Finch, chief executive of the Hay, said on Friday that the book festival’s decision to drop its principal sponsor was taken “in light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw”.

Baillie Gifford is a prominent patron of the arts and provides backing for many of the UK’s leading literary festivals — including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Boswell Book Festival and the Wigtown Book Festival — as well as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Its annual sponsorship of Hay is around £130,000, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The £225bn privately owned asset manager is also 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.

But in the past year or so it has found itself caught in the line of fire of climate activists. Greta Thunberg pulled out of the Edinburgh event last August over its sponsorship by Baillie Gifford, accusing the asset manager of greenwashing, prompting some authors to follow suit.

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

The 11-day festival began in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye on Thursday and speakers including Charlotte Church, comedian Nish Kumar, Labour MP Dawn Butler, Labour peer Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and economics author Grace Blakeley have pulled out over Baillie Gifford’s investments.

“Our first priority is to our audience and our artists,” said Finch. “We must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives.”

In a clip posted by the festival, commentator George Monbiot said he had decided to press on with his session on Thursday because Hay is “a good cause” and “because this thing that we’re protesting against, we are all deeply embedded in”.

“We can’t just point to one instance of this Earth-eating, people-eating system and say, ‘That and that alone is a problem’. We have to deal with the whole thing,” he told the audience.

Baillie Gifford said it was “regrettable our sponsorship with [Hay] festival cannot continue” and rejected the activists’ claims. It said that the suggestion that Baillie Gifford is a large investor in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is “seriously misleading” and conflates two different types of exposure. 

While Baillie Gifford was a large investor in several multinational technology companies, including Amazon, chipmaker Nvidia and Facebook owner Meta, “their commercial dealings with the State of Israel are tiny in the context of their overall business” and “these companies have not violated any laws”, the statement said. 

It added that the asset manager was a minor shareholder in multinational companies — Airbnb, Booking Holdings and Cemex — “that have been identified as having problematic operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”. It noted that in all three cases, “these operations are small in the context of their overall business” and said that “in the absence of international sanctions, they have been forced to adapt their approaches owing to a complex array of legislation that penalises and prohibits actions that would constitute a boycott of Israel”.

Baillie Gifford reiterated that it was “not a significant fossil fuel investor”, pointing out that 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.