Audiences at literary festivals are interesting, interested, responsive and engaged. This is hardly surprising, given that they consist of readers, and moreover readers of the best kind: those who think and want to know more. The would-be self-congratulatory view that the British not merely disclaim but disdain things of the intellect is flatly refuted by the packed rows of seats at Hay, and by the fact that one could hear a pin drop as Eric Hobsbawm talked about the end of empires, and Martin Rees, Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins debated scientific rationality and its enemies.
The events just mentioned were the highlights of my long weekend at Hay, though were I capable of being, like an electron, in more than one place at once there would have been numerous others of the same kind. Eric Hobsbawm canvassed some of the main themes of his forthcoming book on the demise of the great empires of recent history, concluding that the remaining empire, its Rome in DC, is proving unsustainable on the present plan of military power projection. A different empire, that of scientific reason, is certain to fare better, as all three eloquent communicators about science (Rees, Jones and Dawkins) concertedly showed. Speaking almost ex officio as President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees took the irenic view that science should ally itself to moderate religion in order to defeat extremist religion; Dawkins replied that even the nicest bishops do a disservice by making faith respectable, which it is not; and Steve Jones outdid even that by emphatically refusing to grant a place to falsehood however confected.
A different kind of highlight for most authors at literary festivals is the chance to meet some of their readers. Literary festivals are the main agora for this encounter other than the act of reading itself, and a great advantage at Hay is that both sides of the relationship are sure to meet not just in the tented grounds of the festival, but in the bookshops and cafes around town. Whatever the experience for readers in the transaction, it is salutary in lots of ways for authors: it ought to happen more often.
No doubt Chatham House rules apply to private dinner parties, so I will not give the name of the senior Labour politician (except that it was not Gordon Brown) with whom I quarrelled about ID cards one wet and windy Hay night. I asked him to explain the difference between (a) the now-available devices smaller than a full-stop which can encode all biometric and other data destined for ID cards linked to a computerised "central identity register" (God! The very name!) and implantable in an ear-lobe, and (b) a number branded on one's arm. I asked him to give me an iron guarantee that in 20 or 40 or 60 years' time a government would not abuse its access to so much joined-up data about individuals. I asked him to consider that if it were even minimally possible that a future government might abuse such a system, it would surely be better not to put it in place at all.
The response? Well, no one becomes a politician, still less one with as big a future as this chap has, without being capable of the imperviousness, deafness, and bullet-proof certitude he displayed. It says much for Hay that the bitter realisation that I can no longer vote as I have voted for decades, ID cards being the tipping point, was ameliorated by the other delights.
Among them was the number of fellow scribblers who agree on this point. Not all scribblers are "opinion-formers", though plenty of the latter were around, but the straws in the wind are that Labour is shedding a significant constituency by so cavalierly attacking one of the things that matter most to people who read and write: their liberties. In his session at Hay, Gordon Brown said that he would seek to protect civil liberties; he said this because he intends to press ahead, contradictorily, with ID cards, and seeks to toss a biscuit to the canaille while these tracking and surveillance devices are being prepared. No one asked him to consider that whereas laws protecting liberties can be repealed by a simple majority vote in the Commons, dismantling a vast bureaucratic ID card infrastructure would be a very different kettle of fish.
In the tents and the green room and the bookshops the sun shone over Hay, and the festival was festive; on these sidelines the wind blew and the cold rain fell.
