The Hay-on-Wye Hay Festival: The huge marquees, the billowing flags, the jolly deckchairs – an invitation to talk, read, think and, to quote this year’s theme, to ‘explore a world of different…’
Hay Festival exhorts us to ‘not go with the flow. Be the flow’ and promises to ‘create space for challenging conversations’. But where were these spaces? I looked for them.
If Hay wants us to ’look at the world differently’ surely there needs to be a space for more radical conversations? We are living in serious times yet many of the speakers and interviewers were intent on finding optimism at the expense of being honest. None of the speakers in this white-tented-echo-chamber factored in the threat of climate breakdown to their work, their lives, their future. Someone has vacuum packed their ideas to keep them uncontaminated from the fires, floods and droughts that are right now ruining harvests, destroying homes and threatening all the systems that keep us alive.
The speakers didn’t offer solutions to our broken system
First up, Alistair Campbell, who started well: ‘Our politics is broken’ he declared. No-one was arguing. But sadly, and illogically he ended by urging us to vote. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? The system may be broken but it has served him well. The compiler of the ‘dodgy dossier’ that led to an illegal war can come to Hay to sell his book with no real opportunity for any of us with memories to challenge him, beyond perhaps one pithy question if we catch the eye of the guy with the mic.
Tony Juniper from Natural England and sidekicks cheered themselves up with an oft-repeated mantra: ‘We can change the narrative’ but offered no insight into how we might do that. If someone like him can’t, if Caroline Lucas has to leave parliament to work on climate, how do we as ordinary people ‘change the narrative’?
Hay is full of writers, politicians, thinkers and NonGovernmental Organization (NGO) leaders all agreeing we have to change the bloody narrative. Without enough radical voices, Hay is a bubble of well-informed people who already vote, volunteer, and write to their MPs and who clap politely when told to go away and do more of the same. What does it take for Brits to fall out of love with being told to keep calm and carry on?
Then off to listen to Lord Browne. At least he seemed to be facing up to climate breakdown – was this going to be the space for a challenging conversation? Despite admitting that ‘it may be too late’, that we are 25 years behind where we should be and so ‘we have to prep for 3’, perhaps ‘5 degrees’ – a death sentence for billions – he ended by telling us that any action we take needs to be within the law. At that point it would have been good to jump into a space for a challenging conversation given how Lord Browne’s private life has benefited so greatly from the law-breaking of gay rights activists.
So many words, so much hope
Meanwhile the dying Wye snakes past the festival site. So many words, so much hope and yet the fact is, it’s still dying. Thousands who come to Hay every year love that river. But what can they do? Vote? Write a letter? Buy another book? Sign up in the Save the Wye tent?
Different voices with radical strategies
Audiences asked, ‘But what can we do?’ Writers produced checklists for action that pose no threat to business as usual. I ached for some ruthless honesty about the problems we face. Instead, what I got was speakers stuck on an optimism-pessimism continuum instead of a truth-lies continuum. Different voices with radical strategies need to be heard. More people without a book to sell but who have published key papers need to be there, like Professor Tim Lang, who writes on Food Policy and sustainable food diets and can give audiences an insight into sustainable food sourcing. Some things are moving too fast to wait for books to be churned out of the publishing process.
Only by fearlessly facing the hardest truths, exposing misinformation and avoiding unfounded optimism can festivals like Hay stand a chance of being remotely relevant to what we are living through.
The BBC offered entertainment rather than education
And I just realised I forgot to mention the BBC offerings. I wandered into the One Show – sorry – the Today programme – recorded live from the BBC tent. Heavy on entertainment, light on education and information and so irrelevant, no wonder I forgot about it…
The shift in focus to entertainment (social media, instant gratification and lost attention spans) has infiltrated the representation of the festival, specifically from the BBC broadcast which was heavy on entertainment and light on education, when we need more education and less instant entertainment, a time when people need to fight to have their voices heard to make a change.
