Why the Edinburgh International Book Festival needs Jenny Lindsay

THERE IS A WAY of telling the story of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) that has already been told, several times, and told accurately. Nicola Sturgeon gets a plum slot to once again launch Frankly; trans-rights activists and allies are welcomed onto stages; and the festival’s own theme, “Changing Your Mind”, sits there practically begging to be quoted back at itself.

Meanwhile, Jenny Lindsay, Joanna Cherry and the authors of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht are once again nowhere on the programme. Tess White MSP makes the obvious point: that women like Lindsay have paid a significant personal and professional cost for views that, this August, will barely be represented.

All of that is correct. And all of it slightly misses the point.

The standard version of this story treats EIBF’s choices either as a failure or a cowardly betrayal of the festival’s own founding idea of itself as a forum. One can even characterise its failure on a broader historical canvas and call it a dereliction of Edinburgh’s historical place in the Scottish Enlightenment.

I, however, want to try a different reading: one that sees the exclusion of Lindsay not as a failure of the festival’s logic but as the successful operation of it. Because EIBF doesn’t need to platform gender-critical women. What it needs, very precisely, is not to platform gender-critical women. And it needs everyone to notice that it hasn’t platformed them. Their absence is entirely the point. Lindsay is not collateral damage. She is instead co-opted by EIBF to perform an essential structural role for an institution that cannot define itself without her absence.

The festival needs it to be discussed, written up and widely known that Lindsay hasn’t been invited

To understand this mechanism, it helps to step back from the festival entirely and look at the political culture it inhabits and helps sustain.

Dean M. Thomson, writing recently on Substack about the SNP finances scandal, uses C.S. Lewis’s Christian apologetic The Screwtape Letters to anatomise what he calls Sturgeonism: a political style in which the cause of Scottish independence and the leader became, in the imagination of the movement, so indistinguishable that to question her governance was recast as somehow anti-Scottish. Under that arrangement, the party’s own elected scrutineers were expelled for doing their jobs. Joanna Cherry was demonised for asking questions. Douglas Chapman resigned, having been denied the information needed to perform his statutory duties. The independence movement shrank, centripetally, to an ever-decreasing coterie, with an expanding periphery of exiled figures who had committed no offence beyond insisting on their own professional integrity.

That is not a story about the SNP. Or rather, it is not only a story about the SNP. It is a description of a particular social technology now operating across Scottish cultural and political life, of which the Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of its primary stages.

The technology works like this. An institution positions itself centripetally by pulling toward whatever currently constitutes the cultural centre: trans inclusion, the language of ultra-liberal openness, the fashionable sanitising of Palestinian terrorism.

But you cannot have a centre without an edge, and so the centripetal motion necessarily has a centrifugal corollary. The same pull inward expels something outward, and that expulsion needs to be visible. A quiet non-invitation achieves nothing. The festival needs it to be discussed, written up and widely known that Lindsay hasn’t been invited. The exclusion has to be seen by all to be legible as an exclusion. That is the only way the inclusion of the usual suspects reads as a stance rather than a coincidence.

the expulsion is dressed up as moral clarity

Even though they are operating in different registers, Cherry and Lindsay are, in this sense, structurally identical figures. Both are competent, credentialled, serious, and were expelled to the periphery because the centripetal institution cannot afford what their presence at the centre would signify. In both cases, the expulsion is dressed up as moral clarity.

In Screwtape, Hell’s preferred instrument is fashion, not censorship. Nobody needs hate-speech enforcement when an institution can achieve the equivalent result through the simple mechanics of who gets an invitation and who doesn’t. And in both cases, the expelled woman is invited to understand her own marginalisation as a personal failure to have grasped what the moment requires.

Which brings us to the tragic irony of the EIBF’s choices. Centripetal motion is, by definition, motion toward a consensual centre. It is a motion toward the already-sanctioned position. It is motion toward wherever it is currently safest to stand. EIBF presents itself as bold enough to platform difficult ideas, brave enough to change its mind, but it merely self-identifies as radical. What it actually performs is the single least radical act available to any Scottish cultural institution: it moves toward where approval already exists.

The standard critical analysis of this tragedy is that the EIBF is a symptom of a deeper political problem. It is an analysis that is half wrong, because it implies a sequence. It would be as simplistic to suggest that the SNP has produced a cultural settlement which the EIBF faithfully reproduces as it would be to suggest that the EIBF simply reflects Scottish cultural life.

Despite once touring Scotland, it is a pity that Jorge Luis Borges never graced the EIBF. In his writings, mirrors aren’t just abominable because they produce infinite regress but because they produce a world without originals – copies of copies with no founding reality behind them.

The EIBF and the SNP simultaneously co-produce the same reality, each lending the other legitimacy, each making the other’s version of Scotland feel more solid and more inevitable.

The political and the cultural aren’t related as cause to effect – they’re related as two faces of a single mirror, each reflecting the other into existence. The performance of radical thinking staged by the SNP and the EIBF for each other exists nowhere outside of that performance. It has no original. That is the condition of Scotland that this piece has been describing.

The question that remains is whether, from the outside, it is possible to shatter that hall of mirrors – or simply to begin the work of reconstruction on our own.