I was initially pleased to see that the Hay Festival was going to be run as normal this year after pandemic related curtailment with speakers actually turning up in order to voice their ideas in front of inquisitive and sometimes appreciative audiences. I’ve been going to Hay for a few years now and there’s always been something for me whether that be a speaker who I may agree with or a speaker with whom I might be relatively neutral about or not be in agreement with, such as AC Grayling, but who has interesting stuff to say.

Yes I know that Hay leans to the Left and there is a significant eco-fascist presence at both the festival and in the town itself, but in the past the festival did take care to put on speakers, such as the late great PJ O’Rouke, that were not of that left wing world and worldview. Now sadly the Hay Festival seems to have abandoned any pretence of intellectual or viewpoint diversity and the programme this year was so far Left that I struggled to find anything that I might like to attend. I had no desire whatsoever to hear Hilary Clinton wibble on about whatever she feels is fashionable this month and even though I like to hear Simon Schama speak on Jewish history, it was not enough for me to be able to justify the aggro and cost of travelling there.

I also had little confidence,at least from what I could ascertain from reading about what was going on at Hay this year and of observing the festival’s offerings for children in previous years, that there would be anything intellectually diverse for children. It was more than likely that things like make and craft events for kids would have been unbearably woke and biased towards the supporters of green communism.

The middle class left who now dominate the Hay Festival culture are not averse, as we saw from the Family Sex Show scandal involving the ThisEgg theatre company, of propagandising to children and although gross leftist groups like ThisEgg are not connected to the Hay Festival, I suspect that there has been a fair amount of other disagreeable lefty propaganda aimed at children at Hay this year. That’s certainly how it looks when examining what the festival organisers have programmed for the primary aged children. One workshop at Hay this year in the children’s programme is encouraging children to consider eating insects and there’s no way I’m going to take my Jewish son to workshops such as this as the eating of insects is strictly forbidden in Judaism.

It’s a damned shame as there is a lot of genuinely positive stuff that that could be done with children’s activities at a literary festival to stimulate children’s minds and for them to be exposed to the literary world. There’s still the personal appearances by children’s authors which my son likes, but all too often the tickets for these events are more expensive than other Hay tickets. These tickets are also snapped up extremely quickly by the wealthy sharp elbowed ones who do not have to think carefully about where to direct their limited festival going budget towards.

Hay used to be worth the significant effort to get there. OK you might have to put up with a few tiresome lefty organisations and their stalls and the left wing bias of the festival programmers, but it was worth tolerating to hear interesting people and dig around the second hand book stalls. Not any more. It looked like wokery all the way down to the bottom. I think I didn’t miss much by missing Hay this year.

I hope that next year Hay will have more viewpoint diversity and will not be as dominated as it is by wealthy ecoloons. Not everyone who enjoys the life of the mind is a leftist or is cheering for the neo-Malthusian green movement and hopefully the Hay Festival will learn to accept this fact.

However the shift to the left by Hay and the diminishing of intellectual and viewpoint diversity of the festival makes me convinced that festivals like this need some form of competition. They need competition from festivals that are truly intellectually diverse and do not only serve up speakers of an approved left wing or left leaning viewpoint. Back in September 2021 I voiced my concerns about the monothought clique that run festivals like Hay and suggested that what is needed is a festival that is balanced in viewpoint where everyone from the sensible left to the national conservative types, would be able to voice their views and have those views where necessary debated. Having seen this year’s Hay programme and deciding to have nothing to do with it this year I have become even more convinced that a literary festival of disparate and sometimes disagreeing voices is desperately required.