The Hay Festival (Gŵyl Y Gelli) gets underway this week with the usual plethora of big names from the world of literature and the arts taking part in talks, interviews, readings, performances and debates. Over 300,000 are expected to descend on the small Powys town across 10 days, with around 700 separate events on offer. Given the packed and eclectic schedule, there would be something very wrong if there were not plenty to stimulate, interest and entertain in the line-up. The Festival site is free to enter, and although most of the individual events charge to attend, the prices (around £10-£15) can hardly be called exorbitant in 2024.

Right, that’s got the bare facts out of the way in as neutral a tone as I’m capable of delivering. Now can I please unleash the real Dic Mortimer to rip the shit out of this grotesquely overblown, overrated and over-hyped corporate monstrosity? Oh go on, please let me…

Way back in 1995 I went to the Hay Festival twice in a week and spent a fairly enjoyable couple of afternoons wandering around and, amongst other things, taking in Laurie Lee (1914-1997) remembering his childhood in rural Gloucestershire and Mavis Nicholson (1930-1922) describing growing up in Briton Ferry during WW2. That was quite enough for me. I vowed: Never Again. Even though the Festival was then small-scale, proportionate and modest compared to today, I still found it far too crowded (I am the sort who believes nothing can’t be improved by the presence of fewer people), and even though marketing and sponsorship was barely visible compared to the brazen whoring of today, I still found its nagging presence poisonous, offensive and vulgar (I am the sort who believes in the outlawing of all advertising). So, the very thought of battling through heaving, sweaty masses of upper-middle-class English kulture vultures in a muddy paddock full of smelly marquees brings me out in prickly hives, and as for the commercialisation – well, the fact that the 2024 Festival’s “principal partner” is Baillie Gifford, a giant ‘investment management’ firm that invests in, for instance, Israel and fossil fuels, is a damning condemnation in itself.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are seven ‘funders’, including both the UK government and the Welsh government – and you can be absolutely certain that when two bodies currently controlled respectively by the British Tory party and the British Labour party are in accord then the whole jamboree is intrinsically rotten. There are five ‘global partners’, a consequence of the Hay Festival’s empire-building pretensions that have spread its tentacles to Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, Spain and Ukraine in a soul-destroying neo-liberal globalisation exercise of ludicrous over-reach and crushing conformity. There are nine ‘education partners’ such as the Rothschild Foundation, a major supporter of the State of Israel throughout its decades of flouting international law, and Cardiff University, an insolvent institution that has been busy for years enabling the transformation of the capital of Wales into a forest of hideous half-empty tower blocks. There are nine ‘media partners’ of the calibre of TikTok, the Chinese State’s cunning plan to shrivel attention spans and infantilise the world, and the BBC, the British State’s thoroughly compromised, inept, pussy-footing and discredited propaganda arm. There are 29 ‘project partners’, from the Great Western Railway to Visit Wales, the Booker Prize to the Royal Academy, with little in common other than the money for old rope they pay their executives. And then there are no less than 95 ‘sponsors’, consisting mainly of local businesses trying to relieve the generally prosperous Festival-goers of their unearned incomes – or, if I can put it like this, make hay while the sun shines.

Here I should briefly mention the people who run the shindig. Headed by president Stephen Fry, the very embodiment of the snooty British establishment, and chief executive Julie Finch, the very epitome of a corporate careerist, the 13 trustees tick every box in the totally tokenistic ‘diversity, inclusivity, equality’ (DIE for short) mantra that the neo-liberal elite are obliged to pay lip-service to – or else. Two of them are even Welsh!

No, no, no, no, no – I’d rather perform self-trepanning with a screwdriver than attend the Hay Festival. The time is long overdue for the bloated, smug gathering to be put out to pasture. For all its self-congratulatory ‘the Woodstock of the mind’ (© Bill ‘ I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton), it has merely pontificated from the sidelines for 36 years while Wales, the UK and the world have shockingly dumbed down, while frightening fascism has risen from the grave, while billionaire tech-bros have algorithmed society out of existence and while the natural world has been irrevocably slaughtered. Hay visitors don’t need to go far to experience the consequences: just go for a paddle in the soup of human excrement and chicken shit that is now the heartbreaking condition of the once beautiful, pristine, fish-thronged River Wye, the Afon Gwy where we swam and canoed every summer on scout camp just 50 years ago. Hey, Hay! You’re the problem not the solution.