When on Friday the Hay Festival sacked the investment fund Baillie Gifford as its main sponsor, it was felt that a mighty blow had been struck against injustice. The decision was the result of a campaign that protested against the colour of Baillie Gifford’s money, seeing the company as part of a disaster-capitalist enterprise that profits from the destruction of the planet by investing in fossil fuels.

Moral clarity is a hell of a drug. Even if we take as unquestionable principles that fossil fuels are bad, and that literary festivals are an important good, this seems to be a rash and silly move. My iPhone is the fruit of exploitative labour and conflict minerals. Of course, to observe that everything is tainted does not mean that it’s unnecessary to take principled positions. But what is the end game here? If it is to cause investment funds to stop investing in firms that have any ethically questionable involvements, it fails.

Rather, the campaign has taken a fund that does some good things ( sponsoring the free exchange of views and ideas in festivals) and some bad things (owning shares in oil companies) and put a firm stop not to the latter but to the former. That may allow participants in the festival to feel personally uncontaminated by Bad Things, but it doesn’t do much to improve the world.

The campaigners behind this, Fossil Free Books, claim to want to drive fossil fuel money out of the literary and publishing world. That seems a weirdly narrow-minded and self-centered aim. The book world isn’t exactly one of the main channels through which such money flows in the first place. This is not a consumer boycott of the sort that hits a company in the wallet. Baillie Gifford will be richer, rather than otherwise, for not spending a small fortune on sponsoring literary festivals. If the hope was that the threat of refusing its sponsorship would cause this very large company to change its core business model, that was an arrogant one; and now their connection with the festival has been cut off, such influence as Hay had will anyway have vanished.

What if we said that any companies that invest in fossil fuels were to be punished for doing so by being forced to donate a percentage of their profits to good works: sponsoring a literary festival or a book prize, say? It’s hard to see how the current campaigners could be anything other than wholeheartedly in favour.

So is it the fact that Baillie Gifford does what it does voluntarily that irritates? Is the problem that by accepting its sponsorship Hay lets it ’ artwash ’or ’ green wash’ its ill-gotten gains? Well, yes and no. And will we now see the beneficiaries of Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship one by one cut off their noses to spite their faces? If so, that will do a great deal of damage to the literary culture of this country—and absolutely none at all to the fossil fuel industry.

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