The letter marking “one year on from the Baillie Gifford arts sponsorship boycott”, signed by the directors of the Science Museum, British Museum, National Gallery, among others, raises (as the authors write) some vital questions about the responsibility of museums, corporations, policy makers and political parties.
The claim in the letter is a stark one, echoing that made by the UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, in her lecture “Arts for Everyone”, given earlier this year and marking 60 years since the first arts White Paper written by the then Minister for the Arts, Jennie Lee. Nandy’s statement was directed against protests around the corporate sponsorship of festivals and museums:
“I think if she [Jennie Lee] were alive today she would look at the farce that is the moral puritanism which is killing off our arts and culture—for the regions and the artistic talent all over the country where the reach of funding and donors is not long enough—the protests against any or every sponsor of the arts, I believe, would have made her both angered and ashamed.”
Neither Nandy, nor the museum directors's letter, give any mention to what the protests are against (fossil fuel sponsorship), only repeating the charge that boycotting sponsors is “killing these events off”. “This self-defeating virtue signalling is a feature of our times and we will stand against it with everything that we’ve got”, Nandy states.
Protests have been levelled at fossil fuel sponsorship of arts organisations for decades, as Polly Atkins writes in The Bookseller, and most organisations, aware of the moral stakes involved, and the importance of public opinion, have responded responsibly and cut ties. No cultural organisation nowadays would strike up a new fossil fuel sponsorship deal. The problem is largely one of legacy funding, and therefore of inertia.
This makes withdrawal of funding all the more problematic, posing acute difficulties for event organisers, as the case of the investment company Baillie Gifford and the Edinburgh Festival has shown. And yet the fact remains that there is no sign whatsoever that either the Edinburgh Festival or Hay Festival have been ‘killed’ by activists, nor any likelihood that the British Museum or National Gallery will close their doors due to the activities of protesters.
The same might be said of artworks used as part of museum protests, most recently Picasso's 1901 painting of a woman wearing a yellow hat and a thickly jewelled collar, over the glazing of which a young Canadian threw water-based pink paint on 19 June. His eloquent statement makes clear once again the reason why works of art are at the centre of climate protest: "A lot more resources have been put in place to secure and protect this artwork than to protect living, breathing people", he said. "We are now facing a dilemma: to protect art made by long dead artists for no one to see, or to protect the new and future artistic geniuses for their works to be seen by our children and grandchildren. Art only flourishes when people live, not when they survive". No damage was caused to the painting, just as no significant damage has been caused to any work of art in climate protests over the past few years.
To suggest otherwise is not only grossly misinformed, but more seriously to be part of a much wider culture of punishing protesters not for their actions but for the unacceptability of the message they are putting across, which has led in many cases to long prison sentences—a risk that protesters thought worth taking for their cause.
This cause, not mentioned by Nandy, nor the museum directors in their letter, cannot be left out of the equation. It was reiterated this year at the Hay Festival, which also cut ties with Baillie Gifford last year, by none other than Lord Browne, a former chief executive officer of BP. It is no longer much disputed that we are heading towards 3C warming by the end of the century, Browne reportedly remarked, “perhaps 5C”; with the result that vast areas of the planet will become uninhabitable.
To cite one of many current published sources, the 2025 annual report from the World Meteorological Organization states that “global temperatures are expected to continue at or near record levels in the next five years, increasing climate risks and impacts on societies, economies and sustainable development.”
“Planetary Solvency”, the latest report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries on climate change is a pithy summary of these stark truths. Current market-led policies are highly likely to result in “cascading” tipping points, such as Greenland ice sheet melt, the transformation of the Amazon rainforest into a net carbon producer, and, according to research just published, the catastrophic collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which could throw northwestern Europe back into the Ice Age. You do not need to read the mass of data, but simply to look at the surrounding world to see that something nightmarish is happening — not only the increase in extreme weather, but also the continuing widespread indifference to these multiplying changes to our environment and world.
These irreversible events, according to the report, would cause “accelerating and unmanageable damage”, taking us past a point after which it may be impossible to stabilise the climate. We have hugely underestimated the risk of climate change. Given the time frames suggested in the Actuaries report, this may happen within the lifetime of anyone now under the age of 30.
Bearing all this in mind, it might become more understandable why especially young people — those who did not cause or benefit from the conditions that led to catastrophic global heating, but will live through the results — are willing to make such a nuisance of themselves and take risks that would only make sense in an existential life or death situation that requires immediate policy action.
For many, the catastrophe has already arrived, in terms of heat stress, water insecurity, and a rise in infectious diseases. Without drastic action “mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely”, the Actuaries’ report states.
None of this makes easy reading, nor is communicating it an easy way of making new friends. But dismissing protest and activism as “farce” and empty virtue signalling fails to recognise the profound reordering of our world needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, nor the historic effectiveness of protest in changing the course of policy and reshaping corporate responsibility.
What this means, in short, is the importance of taking risks for what you believe in — which might also be a definition of what makes for powerful and effective art.
