The Science Museum will pay a high price for surrendering to the mob
Don’t support museums, the arts or educational institutions. That surely must be the lesson that large corporations are drawing from the instance of a museum ending a sponsorship deal with big oil. The Science Museum in South Kensington, which until now has a record of robustly standing up to activist groups demanding an end to fossil fuel support for its programmes, will no longer accept funding from Equinor, a Norwegian state-owned oil company.
Equinor is now beyond the pale, because the museum has deemed that the oil producer failed to limit its carbon emissions to align with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5C – perhaps not the easiest of goals to meet for a firm whose raison d’etre is to pump out petroleum.
Equinor’s real sin is to own 80 per cent of Rosebank, the North Sea’s largest undeveloped oil and gas field. Last year the then Tory government approved development of the field, although whether this will remain the case under the tutelage of Ed Miliband as energy secretary remains to be seen.
The Science Museum is late to the game of cutting its ties with extractive industries. BP, for many years one of the most generous sponsors of the arts in the UK, has since 2017 had its largesse rejected by the Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Scottish Ballet, Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company. They were all past recipients. Only the British Museum has stood out by renewing a 10 year, £50 million sponsorship deal with the oil major last year.
Why have these institutions turned down free money? They have been targetted by Just Stop Oil and their likes, and the museums and performing arts organisations have all too readily caved in.
The sponsorship arrangements, one must assume entered into by the corporates to burnish their reputations, have done the reverse. After all, it is easy for the orange paint wielding agitators to target the British or Science museums – and get instant publicity, some might say notoriety, for it; rather more difficult to directly and publicly hit a company like Equinor which does not have retail outlets or sell directly to the public.
But what does this severing of ties with the oil industry achieve for the climate activists’ cause, other than publicity? Those who want to dictate who can legitimately give to the arts seem to believe that donating does great, indeed magical, things for the companies involved.
But does anyone really change their mind about climate change because they see the BP logo outside an exhibition? If an oil company with as robust standards as Equinor is beyond the pale – Norway is not known for its cavalier attitude to the environment – then isn’t the lesson that may be drawn by fossil fuel investors the exact opposite of what environmentalists should want? Namely, since we will be regarded as pariahs anyway, to hell with trying to ameliorate the environmental costs of extraction.
Museums, galleries and the performing arts should be under no illusion that such campaigns will stop when the last sponsorship deal with an oil and gas company has been ripped up.
Already this year the investment managers Baillie Gifford has had its sponsorship, dating back decades, of literary festivals, including Hay and Cheltenham, severed. Its crime is having interests, as part of a wide portfolio, in fossil fuels and investments in Israel.
Perhaps the most successful campaign against an arts donor has been that waged against the Sackler family. Their UK charitable trust has given over £60 million to British charities since 2010 and donated £14 million to British institutions in 2020. But then it all went wrong. The Sackler’s wealth is derived from Purdue Pharma, whose marketing of OxyContin is blamed by some for exacerbating the United States’s opioid crisis.
In the last three years the Sackler name has been removed in the UK from galleries and spaces they have sponsored at the Ashmolean, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Design Museum, Serpentine Gallery, Garden Museum, London Library, National Gallery, Tate, University College London, and Oxford and Cambridge universities.
Removing the taint of the Sackler name may make those who run these institutions feel better, but it will do precisely nothing to alleviate opiate addiction. The severing of ties only works as a powerful disincentive to potential donors, in case they should fall foul of future opprobrium. Indeed, the lesson that will surely be drawn is that acts of generosity make wealthy individuals and corporations more vulnerable to targetted campaigns.
If our institutions continue to give in to activist demands they will find it harder and harder to raise money. Inevitably, this will make them more reliant on government funding. But in these straightened times, as the English National Opera most notably discovered last year, they should not expect such support to be generous or to come without tighter strings than any corporation or philanthropist would dare to impose.
The Science Museum has previously been vocal in defended its sponsorship arrangements and explaining why they are essential. That it too has succumbed to activist demands is a worrying sign for all who care about Britain’s arts and museums.