The EIBF has learned nothing about real diversity

This year’s programme is an indictment of the Scottish arts scene

Last year, the board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival was forced to sever ties with its sponsor of two decades, Baillie Gifford. The threats from protestors to disrupt the festival due to Baillie Gifford’s alleged ties with Israel and fossil fuel companies were simply too grave to ignore. Greta Thunberg pulling out of the programme and a pious bunch of petition-signing celebrities helped pile the pressure onto the EIBF and, with regret, they kowtowed.

For those of us in the writing world with openly heterodox opinions, it was a sorry but predictable farce the Scottish arts world had brought on itself. This is what happened in a culture that had done nothing but, for instance, pander to trans activists when they were hounding people with reality-based views on sex and chant blindly along with every trendy “social justice” slogan. If you make political diversity heresy, don’t act surprised when the torch-bearers turn on you.

Activist Greta Thunberg, seen at a protest in Paris, cancelled a planned appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival over investments in the fossil fuel industry by the event's then-sponsor Baillie Gifford | AFP via Getty Images

Alongside the justified schadenfraude there was also tentative hope that a lesson would be learned. That the Scottish literary scene would start to amend this crisis of its own making and start platforming a spectrum of political views. The theme for this year’s festival is ‘Repair’, after all.

Alas though, things remain broken. One would think that in the year the UK Supreme Court confirmed the definition of women in law and multiple politicians have rescinded their support for gender self-ID, there might be a single event featuring a notable women’s rights campaigner. Quite a few of them have written excellent books recently after all. Victoria Smith. Julie Bindel. Susanna Rustin. Orwell-prize shortlisted Hannah Barnes. The Scotland-focused Sunday Times bestseller The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, has come out on paperback, in which over thirty essayists (including myself) are featured.

Yet nothing. I’m not naive enough to be surprised but it remains highly depressing.

One particularly glaring omission

There is one omission that seems particularly glaring however, and that is Jenny Lindsay, a performance poet and leading figure in the Scottish literary scene. In November last year she published a book ‘Hounded: Women, Harms And The Gender Wars’ and there’s few texts that would have complemented the ‘Repair’ theme more aptly. Because before you can fix anything, you have to understand what’s gone wrong, and that’s exactly what ‘Hounded’ explores.

Drawing on Lindsay’s own experience in the arts, where overnight she found herself a target of wrongthink hounding for the crime of calling out violence against women, her book moves through the psychological, social and democratic harms the normalisation of bullying-disguised-as-virtue is wreaking on society. Lindsay had drawn attention to trans-identified Cathy Brennan, a writer for The Skinny, who’d advocated online for physical violence against lesbians at that year’s Pride. For this, Lindsay was branded a ‘TERF’ and subjected to years of harassment and career disruptions. A matter of days after, Brennan allegedly attacked lesbian and women’s rights campaigner Julie Bindel at Edinburgh University. As Lindsay speculated in a recent podcast interview , her being proven right was the most unforgivable thing in her hounders’ eyes.

Of course, it’s at the EIBF’s discretion to invite who they please. No one is entitled to a platform. But on the programme are several of Lindsay’s most vicious and vocal hounders. Alice Tarbuck, for instance, the Literature Officer at Creative Scotland who brought disgrace on the institution when she was exposed as having actually rang bookshops and demanded they do not stock Lindsay’s book. There’s also Harry Josephine Giles, who co-authored a censorious petition to The Scottish Poetry Library against Lindsay and fellow poet Magi Gibson. (I confess I’ve a particular abject loathing for those that orchestrate petitions against individuals, trumped only by my disgust at the sheep who sign them).

Statement of allegiance?

Giles, whose most recent noteworthy public appearance has been screaming “Give us wombs and give us t***ies!” to a crowd of baying activists after the Supreme Court ruling, will be appearing at six events in the programme. It’s hard to read this as anything but a statement of allegiance to misogynistic bullies over a renewed dedication to freedom of expression. What a concerning indictment of the Scottish arts scene.

Susan Smith, left, and Marion Calder, co-directors of For Women Scotland, celebrate outside the Supreme Court in London in April after its ruling on the definition of a woman | PA

In the interest of transparency, Jenny is a dear friend of mine. I’ve known and loved her as a sister in feminism trying to navigate the Orwellian artistic landscape in which we (still) find ourselves. But before that, I knew her as a poet and writer. Without bias, the EIBF has snubbed not only a throughly principled artist but an enviably talented one. Around the time she published her brave, articulate essay ‘Anatomy Of A Hounding’ in The Dark Horse magazine, I was a creative writing student and seeing first hand the damage ideological hiveminderey was doing, not only to aspiring writers’ freedom of expression, but literary quality itself. “Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others” as Albert Camus said. There are seemingly few artists left that embody this spirit. Jenny is one of them.

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My favourite poem of Jenny’s is ‘The Schism Ring’ from her collection This Script. She opens it by describing the menu for a feminist literary gathering - a superficially inclusive, oh-so-safe borefest of gluten-free and vegan cakes, before going on to describe the meaty, unctuous, mischievously un-PC feast she secretly craves - frogs legs, steak on the bone, duck eggs and full-fat buttery mash. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the intellectual hunger so many of us feel around modern feminism, the literary scene or both. It would be disingenuous to say the EIBF doesn’t feature a lot of talented, compelling writers outside the likes of Tarbuck and Giles. All the same, I read the programme and see an artistic climate that remains starved, mostly of courage.

Nina Welsch is a freelance writer