Why we need Richard Demarco's 'Festival of Thought' to counter rise of Reform UK
Edinburgh Festival stalwart Richard Demarco believes it is time for an intellectual fightback to prevent the flame of enlightenment from being dimmed
No conversation with Richard Demarco can have a beginning, a middle and an end. His mind darts from ideas to anecdotes, from references to ancient Greece to mention of his boyhood friend Tommy Connery (better known as Sean), the origins of the Edinburgh Festivals, the geopolitics of the past 80 years, and his travels across the globe carrying a torch for culture.
Demarco says he’s the only person to have attended every Edinburgh Festival since its birth in 1947. For decades, he was a central figure in Scottish cultural life and an early shaper and moulder of the Festival. He was a pioneer of the Fringe and has been a lifelong champion of the power of the arts to improve lives and promote the elemental benefits of culture. However, in recent years, he’s been critical, arguing that the city has become simply a theme park and the various festivals have declined into parochialism.
Demarco is just a few days short of his 95th birthday when I meet him in an idyllic countryside setting, near to where the Lothians meets the Borders. He urges me to drink in the view of a summer garden in full bloom.
Urgent intellectual curiosity
Beyond the garden fence is a lochan with resident swans gracefully surveying their domain. In the distance, the Pentland Hills complete what is a seemingly timeless view. There’s not a pylon or wind turbine in sight.
The sylvan outlook echoes Demarco’s idealism. His body may be bent with age and his hearing not as sharp as it once was, but he burns with urgent intellectual intensity and his passion for the civilizing qualities of culture and human creativity still burns strong.
A teenager in Edinburgh during the Second World War, Demarco says that out of the darkness of that conflict, which saw the crushing of democracy, human rights and freedoms for a time, came a world in desperate need of unity.
He says a miracle came to his native city – the first Edinburgh Festival. “It was an expression of the flowering of the best instincts of the human spirit.” He’d like to see Edinburgh rediscover that spirit and its idealism.
“When the Festival started in Edinburgh in 1947, I thought that the city could be not only the capital of Scotland but the cultural capital of the world. It brought the world’s greatest musicians, actors, singers, dancers, playwrights, poets, authors and artists to my home,” says Demarco. He seems to be looking down a long tunnel to the past, when hope was in the air and the post-war world of Edinburgh and Europe was alive with optimism and possibilities.
Reform’s danger to Edinburgh Festival
No fan of politicians or the language of politics, Demarco is, though, worried by the rise of the hard right and says there’s a chance that Reform UK will usurp the SNP. A Scots-Italian who also considers himself a European, Demarco sees the politics of Reform as the enemy of the beliefs that he has held dear throughout his life. “Reform is a danger to the Edinburgh Festivals,” he says.
Demarco fears the world is on the edge of a new dark age. He sees around him the rise of the authoritarian right and with that the capacity of humankind to dim the flame of enlightenment, “to quench the human spirit”.
He sees in Ukraine more than a fight for territory and national sovereignty: it is essentially a fight for democracy, for freedom of the mind, the heart and the soul. He profoundly believes in liberal democracy as the only civilized way of managing society so that human beings are truly free.
A new hope
Rather than sink into a quagmire of depression because the world is in such poor condition and Edinburgh’s festivals today don’t match up to the youthful dreams he had for them, Demarco says there should be a new festival to add to the current complement.
He wants to see Edinburgh host an annual Festival of Thought. His idea is to bring to the city the world’s finest liberal thinkers from the humanities, from the arts and culture, from all the sciences and technologies. “There should be no separation between science and the arts. Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest artist ever to live, was a great scientist, an engineer and artist,” hesaid.
Demarco draws on Edinburgh’s history as the home of the Scottish Enlightenment and its sobriquet of “the Athens of the North”. “Where better?” he asks. He envisages a flowering of ideas and, eventually, a new kind of university of all the disciplines and all the talents.
Saving liberal democracy
As with all things Demarco, the only barrier to the birth of his new festival is the lack of vision by others. To me, his idea is compelling. Western democracy is tired, its domestic and international institutions floundering for credibility and financially threatened by Donald Trump’s remodelling of America’s place in the world. Europe knows it must look to itself if it is to retain liberal democracy and its freedoms and stay secure and prosperous.
Demarco asks us to bring great minds to bear in Edinburgh to find ways of preserving the very best of our way of life, search for answers to urgent questions and keep the scourge of war from our continent and, of course, create new cultural treasures.
He wants no politicians at his new festival, nor does he want to hear the language of politics. The latter is a debased coinage in his mind. In contrast, “the language of the arts is the language of love for our fellow human beings”, he says. As Richard Demarco celebrates his 95th year, his mind is fertile with fully formed ideas.
The theme of this year’s Edinburgh Festival is “the truth we seek”. Perhaps the Festival and one of its greatest champions are once again in harmony. That would be an appropriate birthday present.
Martin Roche sits on the executive committee of the European Movement in Scotland.
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