Fringe society’s refusal to bow to activists and keep Baillie Gifford is welcome - Scotsman leader

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society’s decision to retain investment manager Baillie Gifford as a sponsor is a rare piece of good news in arts funding.

It comes amid a “fevered” atmosphere around its involvement in arts events, and represents a stemming of the flow after activists forced a string of literary festivals to shed their sponsorship deals with the Edinburgh-based firm, targeted because of its (minimal) investments with links to fossil fuels, and others with (disputed) links to, or support of, Israel.

The company’s sponsorship money has been used to support the Fringe’s education and access programme, bringing access to the festival to people in 30 communities around Edinburgh who would otherwise struggle to enjoy what it has to offer. This is money which would have been missed.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe Launch 2024

Shona McCarthy, the Society’s Chief Executive, said the board had “a serious and detailed discussion about all of this” before reaching their decision. And we can only hope this is the start of a fight back against a group of authors and activists who appear as dismissive of the damage their action is wreaking as they are ineffective at forcing any true change in the areas they care about. After all, not one penny of investment has been divested as a consequence of their action. All that has happened is they have defunded some literary festivals.

Even Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie, one of Scottish politics’ more radical voices, branded festivals a “soft target” in an interview with the BBC, drawing parallels with equally ineffective Extinction Rebellion protests “which impact on people rather than on the targets like the big fossil fuel companies”.

We couldn’t put it better ourselves. And we should remember that there is far from unanimity within the literary world at the protests.

It’s long past time we stood up against the shrill and shallow protests of environmental activists, and continued a broader and more sensible debate about both the best way to decarbonise our economy, and fund our arts.

A real show-starting performance

A feature of last weekend’s hugely successful Taylor Swift concerts in Edinburgh were just how well organised the record-breaking events were.

A good-natured audience of 220,000 – equivalent to one in 20 of the Scottish population – filtered through west Edinburgh over three days successfully, with none of the issues which usually accompany such mammoth events.

As an advert for how Edinburgh can host the biggest events in the world, the Murrayfield event was about as good as it could have been. And the nation’s biggest concert promoter Geoff Ellis, chief executive of DF Concerts, tells us today it has placed the capital in an “enviable position” for hosting major outdoor events in the future.

Clearly events – and crowds – are different depending on the demographic of the audience, and the local community needs to be taken into account, but it is clear there is an exciting opportunity here.

As last weekend proved, Edinburgh can really steal the show.