From 2025:
Scottish culture is in danger of being strangled to death by activists (aka "How Scottish culture is in danger of being strangled to death by activists")
An air of crisis hangs over the Scottish arts world following this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, which has been rocked by a series of protests, artist cancellations and a climate of intimidation. “McCarthyite” is how one attendee describes it to me. “What people seem to have misunderstood is that the purpose of the Fringe is the interaction and exchange of ideas.”
On August 2, an event featuring John Swinney, Scotland’s First Minister, in conversation with the writer Susan Morrison on the subject of “life, art, politics and Scotland’s future” was interrupted five times by six different groups of protesters calling for the Scottish government to end funding to arms companies. And at the Fringe venue Summerhall, which earlier this year received a grant of £600,000 from Creative Scotland, staff apologised to audiences ahead of an appearance by Kate Forbes, the deputy first minister and a devout and gender-critical Christian, saying they were concerned about “the safety and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ artists, staff and audiences by attracting those who share her ‘views’” and that the decision to invite her was “an oversight”.
The Edinburgh Book Festival has been roundly criticised after failing to include Scottish authors with gender-critical opinions in its programme, including the authors of the best selling The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, an account of the grass roots campaign against Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which sought to remove most of the legal requirements needed to change gender (the bill was blocked by the UK Government). And two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, had their shows cancelled at the Whistle Binkies venue after bar staff expressed fears of “being unsafe”.
“It felt like every day there was a new protest,” is how one prominent festival-goer put it. “There is a crisis in Scottish culture,” added a leading Scottish author who didn’t want to be named, describing the Scottish arts climate as too “toxic” as a result of “those in charge having very little interest in Scotland’s artistic or intellectual life, instead using their position to advocate for their own divisive political obsessions and the artists that they decide best embody them”.
In an essay for The Dark Horse poetry magazine earlier this year, the poet Don Paterson laid into what he calls the stranglehold of “Identitarianism” on Scottish national politics and its consequences for the arts. “The misplaced sense of self-importance that tends to dog the world of arts administration had led it to forget that its job was the nurturing and promotion of Scottish excellence and talent, not the defence of the culture’s ideological purity,” he wrote.
This crisis has been felt acutely in the conversation surrounding trans rights. The Scottish literary scene was rocked last year when the Edinburgh International Book Festival, alongside seven other literary festivals across Britain, severed links with its principal sponsor, the Scottish investment fund Baillie Gifford. It followed a sustained nationwide campaign by Fossil Free Books (FFB) over the fund’s investments in fossil fuels (about 2 per cent of investments overall) and what FFB described as companies “linked to the Israeli military” – a description Baillie Gifford said is “seriously misleading”.
FFB primarily campaigns on climate change, but it shares strong ideological overlaps with those who protest against the war in Gaza and, crucially, with pro-trans activists.
Edinburgh has form in silencing gender-critical artists and speakers: the comic Graham Linehan was forced to perform outside Holyrood in 2023 after Leith Arches pulled his show. In the same year, the Stand comedy venue cancelled an appearance by Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP, after she voiced opposition to the SNP’s gender recognition reform plans.
Linehan, who this week was arrested by British police for jokes and comments he made online about trans people, tweeted at the time that the actions of Leith Arches “sure sounds like discrimination on the grounds of my legally protected beliefs”, while the Stand retracted its position after Cherry threatened legal action. Meanwhile, beyond the festival, the National Library of Scotland was last month embroiled in controversy when it excluded The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht from a display celebrating Scottish culture after staff threatened to disrupt the exhibition if it was included.
“Scotland has been a vicious place to be a gender-critical writer,” says Jenny Lindsay, a Scottish performance poet and the author of Hounded, a defence of gender criticism. She says she has suffered a sustained campaign of online abuse since speaking out against trans activists in 2019, when Scotland began consulting on its proposed changes to gender recognition. She has been advised by police in the past not to attend events unaccompanied, and has lost work as a result.
Scotland’s small size, adds Lindsay, means the link between nationalism and identity politics in the country has had a profound effect on the creative sector. “Everything is very incestuous,” she says. She points out that Edinburgh International Book Festival has never had a gender-critical writer discuss a gender-critical book.
“What’s really frustrating is that a lot of the time it’s the same small group of people involved, but they have been given so much power by very, very nervous cultural leaders,” she says. Lindsay and other leading members of the Scottish arts scene have reacted with dismay to the decision of Jenny Niven, the Book Festival’s director, to prioritise voices on the programme who, as Lindsay puts it, “are the very people who have made our life [as gender-critical authors] hell”.
Many believe this climate has become increasingly intimidating, even threatening. One woman who participated in an Edinburgh International Book Festival panel event told me: “I think everyone must know full well that had the book festival programmed an event on The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the event – and perhaps the whole festival – would have been targeted with protest and probably violence.”
David Greig, a Scottish playwright who this year stepped down as the artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, says: “The previous chairman of the Book Festival board said last year that one of the reasons they had stopped the funding from Baillie Gifford was that they were afraid for the safety of their staff.” (The book festival was kept afloat this year by a £300,000 grant from the Scottish government.) “But if you’re afraid for the safety of your staff, to invite those people who led the campaign that has caused you to be afraid for their safety, well, that’s just bewildering.”
Like many people I spoke to, one author, who wanted to stay anonymous for fears over her career, said the culture war debates aren’t actually about the gap between the marginalised and the powerful, however activists might like to frame it as such. “It’s really about fairly insecure cultural establishments who would rather shore up their position by being pious social justice warriors rather than by sticking to standards of excellence and cultural achievement. You have to remember that Scotland is 93 per cent white. And there is a sort of guilt about that. It feels cringingly un-modern.”
Scotland is also historically politically consensual. “If you look at the votes in the 1950s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted Conservative,” points out Greig. “And then in the 1980s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted Labour. And then in the 2000s, over 50 per cent of Scots voted SNP. So we are, by nature, a slightly consensus-driven country, and that can be quite useful. But it is also bad for art and bad for political discourse.”
Yet Greig also notes that much of what has happened in Scotland across the festival as a whole reflects a now-entrenched confusion within the West over the role and purpose of the arts. “There’s been this move towards an HR-style approach to the arts in Britain and America, which has been about trying to improve the morals of artists. This is not exclusive to Scotland.”
Nonetheless, this cultural conservatism, combined with the specific economics of the Edinburgh Fringe post pandemic, where costs have soared in recent years, are having profound consequences for the Fringe. “I would love to see a play that puts both sides of the trans debate,” says Grieg. “But you aren’t seeing it. You no longer, for instance, get plays at the Fringe such as David Harrower’s Blackbird or Anthony Neilson’s Stitching – [two big Fringe hits in the 2000s that both thrillingly explored the morally ambiguous line between abuser and victim within sexual relationships].”
Greig continues: “When I was director of the Lyceum, I got a lot of flak because we refused to take a stand on the Black Lives Matter movement. But that was not our job. The bigger institutions, such as the Book Festival or the Edinburgh International Festival, need to reaffirm the point that they do not take sides in political issues but are instead the means by which artists have the freedom to explore these things.”
So what is the cost to the reputation of Scottish arts as a result of all this? And what damage is being done to the Fringe, which was set up in 1947 as the International Festival’s ungovernable rebellious little sister and which has championed free speech since its inception? “When I was on the board of the Fringe Society between 1986 and 2012, we would often have discussions about offensive subjects,” says Simon Fanshawe, a former stand-up comedian and Perrier Award winner who is now rector of Edinburgh University.
“But the view was ‘that’s the point of the Fringe’. Jonathan Miller used to call it a Darwinian crap shoot. As long as what you are doing is lawful, then the Fringe is the place to do it. But when you have Jewish comedians being told they are not welcome, then that seems inherently damaging. And the book festival has certainly been damaged, no question. The Left has decided that censorship is a progressive tool, and that’s really dangerous. Because when you try to censor [something], the next thing that will happen is that they will censor you,” says Fanshawe.
Yet there are signs that things are changing. The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), which is separate from the Fringe and is programmed by its current artistic director, Nicola Benedetti, has so far resisted pressure to cut funding links with Baillie Gifford. Fanshawe adds that he received nothing but support from the EIF when he was targeted by an organisation called Arts for Palestine ahead of his appearance at two panel debates on artistic and academic freedom, because of his association with LGB Alliance, a group Arts for Palestine labels “transphobic”.
“Arts for Palestine tried to undermine open discussion around academic and artistic freedom but the EIF stood by me,” he says. “What’s more, our panels were deliberately argumentative. There is a push-back. People are starting to show leadership. And people are starting to say no.”
Greig says that audiences want change. “The arts world in Britain and in America has had a stick up its a--- for a decade or so.” But now, “they don’t want to be treated like idiots. You can see this in the West End success of Giant [Mark Rosenblatt’s Royal Court hit about Roald Dahl and anti-Semitism], which forces audiences to look at both sides of a debate. No one likes a Puritan. And that’s why the Restoration came after Cromwell. We all lie to ourselves, we all tell ourselves that we’re virtuous, but secretly we’re not. And that’s what artists are there for to show us.”
