Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s World At One were subjected to a stern lecture last week, courtesy of a 31-year-old novelist named Yara Rodrigues Fowler.
Author and climate activist Mikaela Loach walked out of her event at Edinburgh International Book Festival, hysterically accusing the festival's main sponsor Baillie Gifford of ‘bankrolling the climate crisis' Yet such trifling matters count for little in this era of cancel culture. So Rodrigues Fowler and her comrades at Fossil Free Books are having a truly chilling effect on the literary scene.
READ MORE: STEPHEN DAISLEY: Why HAVE these noisy zealots been allowed to hijack our culture for their own intolerant ends? Advertisement Punters aren’t the only victims, either. The Edinburgh International Book Festival, for example, points that Baillie Gifford has for years provided essential funding for its ‘Children’s and Schools’ programmes, subsidising free tickets to events, free books for every attending pupil, and cut-price travel.
Of that sum, a mere one per cent is invested in so-called ‘fossil fuel’ investments, a number which rises to two per cent if you decide to include shares in the likes of Tesco on the grounds that the retailer operates the odd petrol station. It certainly seems to be doing more to address climate change than, to cite one example, Charlotte Church.
Fellow activist Andres Ordorica in Hong Kong - one of many holiday hotspots he has enjoyed, including Milan, Bologna, Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Washington DC, San Antonio, Texas, California and Seville Does that merit a cancellation campaign? Not according to, among others, Philippe Sands KC, a human rights lawyer who is acting for Palestinians at the International Court of Justice. He recently gave a lecture saying that, having ‘looked at this very carefully’, he believed the campaign against Baillie Gifford was based on ‘tenuous’ evidence.
Assuming she didn’t get to this event via transatlantic sailing boat, it’s hard to see how Rodrigues Fowler justifies such gallivanting, given her ultra-puritanical approach to combating the so-called ‘climate emergency’.