THE Edinburgh International Book Festival is a “prestige” event. The atmosphere is relaxed, the tickets are expensive and heaven help those who don’t have a VIP pass.

A group of literary agents gave a talk, justifying their indispensable role in getting published (they need to establish your brand, apparently) and when they took a poll two thirds of the audience were looking for an agent.

But there was no way you could get into that tent, and the friendliness was a charade.

When Noam Chomsky appeared he treated it like a Zoom meeting, on his laptop, and that bearded face was projected onto a vast cinema screen flanked by organ pipes in the enormous galleried Methodist Church that is Central Hall on Lothian Road.

He wanted to describe how “free speech” and “open debate” take place within an ideologically circumscribed arena that polices its own boundaries. This is a political strategy constructed to render certain kinds of rational thinking not just “impermissible,” but “unthinkable.”

In his affable and erudite way he began by describing Orwell’s argument in the original introduction to Animal Farm that was suppressed for half a century. Orwell described how the self-censorship that operated in English culture was every bit as effective a way to defend the status quo as the censorship outlined in his satire of totalitarianism.

Then he pointed out that an exhaustive account of the events leading to the war in Ukraine in the Washington Post excluded the fact that Ukraine’s membership of Nato had been a “red line” for the Russians for 30 years, and is the single issue that must be on the table in any serious peace negotiation.

These comments have already been misrepresented in the press as “Chomsky tells audience Putin should be given benefit of the doubt.”

At the time, instead of exploring Chomsky’s theme, the interviewer, the Guardian’s Nesrine Malik, simply changed the subject.

To witness Chomsky’s rising disgust at the line of questioning was the highlight of the festival and his eventual putdown of Malik was intensely memorable: “Don’t bother speaking truth to power. I’ve been saying this for 50 years! What you should be doing is to bring truth to the powerless! And then organising them so they can act!”

Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s pavements were overflowing with rubbish, rail strikes punctuated the entire duration, and on August 16 Mick Lynch addressed a packed-out meeting in Glasgow.

But you wouldn't know any of that by listening to Irvine Welsh, Douglas Stuart, Val McDiarmid, Liz Lockhead or Hannah Lavery for all of whom being “working class” is the indispensable attribute of being a Scottish writer.

But the working-class experience they convey is either entirely nostalgic, or in the case of Welsh, a kind of autistic enclosure in a private universe of sadistic fantasy. It is recycled as literary stuff for middle-class consumption and entirely stripped of solidarity, class consciousness or acknowledgement of the present day.

You wonder – is this de-politicised image of the Scottish working class an image that has arisen precisely to oppress them?

This is the kind of question that might once have been debated at the Book Festival, which owes its reputation to fearsome confrontations when, in the 1960s, writers were brought together on panels to discuss contemporary issues – nationalism, revolutionary politics, the death of the novel… you name it.

But while such events would be easy to organise they belong to the “unthinkable.” It’s a shame. Imagine how great it would be to have Welsh, Lockhart and Stuart on a panel with Mick Lynch, Jeremy Corbyn or a genuine politician turned author like Neil Findlay?

But you can see why it doesn’t happen. The book festival is exclusively a marketing event conducted through an intimidating format: TV style interviews and token audience questions. And in all its exclusive elitism a live political agenda drives the spectacle.

It came as a shock that for the closing event Nicola Sturgeon was onstage to interview Brian Cox about his autobiography. What qualification does she have to comment on literary writing, theatre or cinema? Quickly the answer became obvious – absolutely none.

Once their orgy of mutual admiration had begun Cox had to be steered past a number of alarmingly naive and right-wing views – his frank admiration of the Nazi Herman Goering, and his endorsement of the emigree Mikhail Barysznikow’s US-based True Russia Foundation – in order to allude without any political discussion to his support for her putative independence campaign.

This was simply an exercise in celebrity endorsement for nationalist politics in circumstances that throttled debate.

Full points to the woman who took the mic, turned her back on the speakers and addressed the audience with her own traumatic and tragic experience of the SNP’s neglect of social care and care workers.

When politics has hijacked an event like this, the best you can do is to wrench it back.