Hay Festival suspends Baillie Gifford sponsorship after controversy

The Hay Festival has terminated its sponsorship agreement with management investment company Baillie Gifford following controversy over the company’s links to Israel and fossil fuel companies.

The news came after artists such as Charlotte Church and Nish Kumar cancelled their performances at the prestigious festival in protest against the deal.

Church is among the celebrities who have joined calls for a ceasefire after Israel launched a military campaign to annihilate Hamas in response to Hamas’s cross-border attack on southern Israel last year.

Julie Finch, chief executive of the Hay Festival, said the decision had been made “in light of demands made by activists and intense pressure on artists to withdraw”.

She added: “Our first priority is our audiences and our artists. Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion where audiences can hear a range of perspectives.”

“We are grateful to all the artists, partners and audience members who are involved on and behind the stage and contribute to the conversation.”

Earlier on Friday, Ms Finch said they would continue to “work with Baillie Gifford and other arts industry partners to resolve this issue”.

Baillie Gifford said the claim that the company was “a major investor in the occupied Palestinian territories” was seriously misleading.

In her statement posted on Instagram on Thursday, Church, a singer and pro-Palestinian activist, said she was boycotting “in protest of the artwashing and greenwashing evident in this sponsorship.”

“Your art festival is not more important than the lives of Palestinian children and the future of healthy ecosystems on Earth,” she wrote on social media.

“If the art world continues to accept this dirty money, we are all complicit.”

Earlier, comedian Kumar released a statement from Fossil Free Books, the campaign’s director, adding: “I love the festival and the people who work there, but for me this was the right decision.”

A Fossil Free Books organizer described Ms Finch’s decision as proof of “the power we have when we unite as workers.”

Other speakers who cancelled their attendance included Labour MP Dawn Butler, Labour peer Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and economics writer Grace Blakeley.

Others, like George Monbiot, chose to perform at the festival on Thursday, but in a clip posted by the festival he said he chose to perform because Hay was “a good cause” and “because we are all deeply rooted in this cause that we are protesting against”.

“We cannot point to just 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.

According to Fossil Free Books, founded by literary industry professionals, Baillie Gifford invests in companies “linked to the Israeli military,” Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and a number of large fossil fuel companies.

The company is a major investor in several multinational technology companies such as Amazon, Nvidia and Meta, which “have only limited business relationships with the State of Israel in the context of their overall business,” it said.

In addition, the company is a “small” investor in “three companies that have been identified as having activities in the occupied Palestinian territories,” it added. It added: “We are committed to responsibly analyzing and working with the companies we invest in. This work is ongoing and progress has been made.”

However, it is the responsibility of customers to make “subjective ethical assessments about sectors (such as fossil fuels) or countries (such as Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories).”

“We are not in a position to make exclusions of this kind based on our own ethical judgments or in response to pressure from external groups.”

Baillie Gifford added that the company is “not a significant investor in the fossil fuel space” because two percent of its clients’ money is invested in companies that also have business relationships with fossil fuels.

The statement said they were “a long-standing supporter of literature and the arts… driven by a belief that we should contribute to the communities in which we operate, in the hope that the organizations we work with will reap lasting benefits.”

According to Fossil Free Books, the 2% figure equates to between £2.5 billion and £5 billion.

Church wrote: “That’s many times the combined net worth of everyone involved in the Hay Festival. ‘Only 2%’ is not good enough.”