Pressuring book festivals to divest from Baillie Gifford over its tenuous links to climate change and war in the Middle East is characteristic of the woolly thinking underpinning protest culture, says James Price
We are all now, sadly, used to nonsense campus trivialities migrating from universities and into the office and even the streets. What ten years ago was confined to interminable student union societies is now a suffocating reality across western workplaces. Everything from the ‘microaggression’ (that apparently always requires a macro response), to compulsory sessions on DEI have wormed their way into businesses, and the kind of jew hate that used to be limited to the Corbynite fringes of society now gets central London to itself almost every Saturday.
What once were useful, even noble, campaigns to highlight the inequalities in society and in professional life faced by, say women or gay people, have now not only spread to every issue imaginable, but they have also blurred into one, generic ‘omnicause’. This does no good for the groups it purports to support.
Take the pressurising of the Hay and Edinburgh book festivals to disassociate from Baillie Gifford, one of Britain’s best and most far-sighted investment management firms. Their crime? Well, the protesters aren’t quite sure. It’s either climate or connections to Israel. If the former, Baillie Gifford is a weird target, given the huge amounts they have done to further the development of electric vehicles. And if the latter, its connections to the Middle East’s only democracy are only as strong as any other company on earth with an international footprint. And if these companies are so evil, surely the logic flows that it would be better for them to have less money, and they should be encouraged to give more of it away?
This kind of confused campaigning stems from old leftist ideas about ‘solidarity’, but often now goes by the trendier name of ‘intersectionality’. This is the idea that multiple forms of inequality and disadvantage can compound, so a black woman is more disadvantaged than a black man or a white woman. Quite apart from how horribly divisive and reductionist this way of ordering society is, it begs a tricky question for campaigners: what happens when it’s not immediately obvious who the bigger victim is?
It’s all very well for Greta Thunberg to swap skipping school for donning a keffiyeh and marching against Israel, but what happens when a pro-Palestine march bumps into an LGBT Pride march, something that actually happened in Philadelphia over the weekend?
So far, so silly. But the bigger question is: Will this kind of omnicause omnishambles actually end global capitalism? Of course not. However, if politicians in Britain did listen to these people, they certainly could immiserate the UK with a series of economically illiterate policies that damage the poorest in society and cause the wealthy to leave. And by targeting the philanthropic arms of big organisations, they are already preventing these companies from doing massive amounts of good. Baillie Gifford’s support for book festivals has included huge charitable efforts aimed at improving literacy for the poorest people in Britain. That will all end now, for absolutely no gain or benefit to humanity whatsoever.
As well as blocking help for poor kids to learn to read, this surfeit of ‘activism’ crowds out legitimate causes, and also prevents meaningful dialogue on important issues. But it also drags business into the realms of politics, which is a bad thing for us all. If Rachel Reeves is serious that Labour is a pro-business party again, then we should all breathe a sigh of relief. Industry can heed the words of Milton Friedman, that the business of business is business. If companies want to donate to good causes, then that is a wonderful thing and gives credence to Adam Smith’s dictum that man desires not just to be loved, but to be lovely.
So, we should all of us ignore the omnicause when it fleetingly and half-heartedly turns its attention to the next thing. Dragging both the private and charitable sectors into the latest political scuffle or culture war is a sure-fire way to turn people off whatever the cause is, and leave us poorer and more divided as a result.
James Price is a former government adviser