‘Art should not be political’ is an argument made by those who haven’t thought enough about either

In recent weeks, writers and publishing people in the UK have been embroiled in a long and gruelling controversy over the sponsorship of literary festivals. Earlier this year, Fossil Free Books – a group founded, as its name suggests, to pressure the publishing industry into more disentangling itself from the fossil fuel industry – broadened its remit to include activism around Israel’s ongoing campaign of slaughter and displacement in Gaza. The group began to contact writers who were due to hold events at the Hay and Edinburgh book festivals, encouraging collective action to put pressure on the investment management firm Baillie Gifford, a large sponsor of those festivals, to divest from the fossil fuel industry, and from companies that profit, as they put it, from “Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”. Several writers pulled out of their events, or threatened to do so; Hay responded to the pressure by ending its partnership with Baillie Gifford, and soon after Edinburgh announced that it had – regretfully, and as a result of intolerable pressure from the activists – parted ways with the firm. Several smaller festivals, such as Cheltenham and Borders, followed suit. (Baillie Gifford still remains as the sole sponsor of the Baillie Gifford Prize, which is the UK’s largest and most prestigious award for non-fiction writing.)

As a writer who is currently promoting a recently-published book – and as someone with friends who work in publishing, and at literary festivals – I am unavoidably somewhat embroiled in this thing. Before Baillie Gifford ended its Edinburgh sponsorship, I discussed with my publisher the prospect of pulling out of my event at this year’s festival. I didn’t feel any pressure from Fossil Free Books, but I did feel that I should support in some way an effort by a group of fellow writers to do something concrete, in an area within their power, about the extent of their own industry’s entanglement, however small, with the immense suffering of the people of Gaza.

But I was, to be honest, a little ambivalent about it. Thanks to many years of Tory austerity, funding for arts events in the UK is increasingly precarious, and book festivals have been having a tough time of it since the pandemic. Whether you see it as pennies from heaven or a deal with the devil, corporate sponsorship is sort of just a fact of life in the arts in the UK. You could also reasonably argue, as many in the UK media have, that Baillie Gifford is hardly the most egregious of offenders in terms of either fossil fuel investments or links with the apparatus of Israeli state violence. When my first book was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2017, I was invited to their Edinburgh headquarters in that singing-for-your-supper way most writers are nowadays familiar with, and found the people I met there were all very smart and thoughtful and interesting. This is not, of course, to argue that they are any less culpable for the more unethical investments they preside over, but merely to point out that they are human beings, like many of the rest of us, operating within (and contributing to) the deepening disaster of capitalism.

And then, with the reaction of the UK press to the Hay and Edinburgh news, I was suddenly a lot less ambivalent. There was, in the Telegraph, the inevitable denunciation of the activists as “climate fanatics”, which seemed less a critique than a sort of preconscious ideological reflex. There was, similarly, a Spectator cartoon that depicted two scruffy protesters, under a Fossil Free Books banner, fretting over a heap of books with the caption: “Oh no! We can’t burn them as they’ll produce harmful CO2.”

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The Sunday Times columnist Hadley Freeman, writing in the pro-Israel weekly The Jewish Chronicle, accused the protesters of being “raging narcissists” and “conspiracy theorists”, without really giving any sense of why, other than that she was extremely angry about them. The conspiracy theorist accusation might be accounted for by plain old psychological projection, given that she herself had posted on X, about a week previously, that it was “Kinda interesting” that Fossil Free Books had launched on October 7th, 2023. It did not in fact launch on October 7th, 2023, and the attempt to link a group of literary activists to Hamas’s savage massacre of Israelis on that date was “kinda interesting” only as evidence of Freeman’s own crude and flailing paranoia – and of the stultifying intellectual effects of too long a deployment in the shallow trenches of the culture war, firing blanks at straw men.

No one was claiming in the first place that art and politics were the same. But the idea that art should somehow be unencumbered by politics is a notion far more prevalent among newspaper columnists than artists themselves

Earlier this week, the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde discussed the situation on a podcast she hosts with Richard Osman, the comedy panel show presenter-turned-author of a wildly popular series of “cosy-crime” novels. Hyde and Osman’s sheer contempt for Fossil Free Books was palpable and seemed to verge on a distaste for activism as a whole. “Art and politics are not the same,” she said, “and if you insist that all art must be politicised, and that all artists must make statements all the time, then what you are essentially wishing for is a contraction of the human experience, a contraction of human possibility.”

No one, of course, was claiming in the first place that art and politics were the same. But the idea that art should somehow be wholly unencumbered by politics – that it should be blithely unconcerned with the ways in which human lives are shaped and often destroyed by the operations of power – is a notion far more prevalent among newspaper columnists than artists themselves. It’s an argument, in my view, that tends to be made by people with no interest in thinking seriously about either art or politics. In the real world – where bombs fall on children, where the oceans inexorably rise, and where art of real value is made – politics is not an exam subject you can take or leave. The kind of activism practised by Fossil Free Books might be a blunt and imperfect instrument, but unlike their more intemperate critics in the media, they at least understand this.