Hay Festival suspends sponsorship of Baillie Gifford after protests

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The Hay Festival has suspended its sponsorship by Baillie Gifford following boycotts by speakers and artists over the Edinburgh-based asset manager’s alleged links to Israel and the fossil fuel industry.

Julie Finch, chief executive of the Hay, said on Friday the book festival’s decision to drop its main sponsor had been made “in light of allegations made by activists and intense pressure on artists to withdraw”.

Baillie Gifford is a prominent patron of the arts and supports many of Britain’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. Hay’s annual grant is around £130,000, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The privately owned asset manager, with assets of £225 billion, has also long invested in companies seeking to drive the transition to clean energy, with large stakes in companies such as electric car maker Tesla and Swedish battery maker Northvolt.

But last year the event came under fire from climate activists. Greta Thunberg withdrew from the event in Edinburgh last August because it was sponsored by Baillie Gifford. She accused the asset manager of greenwashing, and some authors followed her example.

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

The 11-day festival began on Thursday in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye and speakers including Charlotte Church, comedian Nish Kumar, Labour MP Dawn Butler, Labour peer Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and business writer Grace Blakeley have withdrawn from the event because of Baillie Gifford’s investments.

“Our top priority is our audiences and our artists,” Finch said. “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 go ahead with his session on Thursday because Hay was “a good thing” and “because we are all deeply rooted in this cause that we are protesting against”.

“We cannot just point to one example of this system that is devouring the earth and its people and say, ‘This and only this is a problem.’ We have to deal with the whole thing,” he told the audience.

Baillie Gifford said it was “regrettable that our sponsorship of the (Hay) Festival cannot continue” and refuted the activists’ claims, saying the claim that Baillie Gifford is a major investor in the occupied Palestinian territories was “seriously misleading” and conflates two different types of reporting.

Although Baillie Gifford is a major investor in several multinational technology companies, including Amazon, chipmaker Nvidia and Facebook owner Meta, “their commercial relations with the State of Israel are minimal in the context of their overall business activities” and “these companies have not violated any laws,” the statement said.

It went on to say that the asset manager was a small shareholder in multinational companies – Airbnb, Booking Holdings and Cemex – “which were found to be carrying out problematic business activities in the occupied Palestinian territories”. In all three cases, it said, “they were small business activities in the context of their overall business” and “in the absence of international sanctions, they were forced to adapt their practices, as a complex set of laws penalizes and prohibits actions that would amount to a boycott of Israel”.

Baillie Gifford reiterated that the company is “not a significant investor in the fossil fuel sector” and pointed out that only two percent of its clients’ money is invested in companies that also have fossil fuel businesses, compared to the market average of 11 percent.