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A director of a literary festival should have two unshakeable principles
She or he must believe in free debate.
And she or he must respect language and not use it, like great and petty tyrants throughout history, to obfuscate and mislead.
It is not always easy to grasp what Jenny Niven means, but as far as I can see the director of this summer’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, rejects both.
As readers went through the festival programme it became clear that Niven was operating a de facto ban on the authors who criticised gender orthodoxy.
Nowhere was there space to be found for discussion of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheehst, (“wheehst” is Scots for “shut up”). Thirty women from all over Scotland, led by J.K Rowling, described how they had been punished for fighting the Scottish government as it tried to deny the material reality of biological sex and send rapists to women’s prisons.
How Scotland, the home of the Enlightenment, became the home of the witch hunt, was an issue worthy of serious debate, you might have thought.
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