Leeds: Child asylum seekers wrongly classed as adults - report

Published
2 days ago

IMAGE SOURCE,LIZ WEDDON/UNSPLASH (VIA LDRS)

Image caption,

30 unaccompanied child asylum seekers were put up in Leeds hotels, according to the city council

By David Spereall

BBC

Local Democracy Reporting Service

Thirty child asylum seekers were wrongly categorised as adults by the Home Office, according to a council report.

The children, all thought to have arrived in the UK without their parents, were placed in Leeds hotels with adult strangers.

The Home Office said assessing age was a "very difficult task".

The report will be considered by Leeds City Council's children and young people scrutiny board next week.

IMAGE SOURCE,BENJAMIN ELLIOT/UNSPLASH (VIA LDRS)

Image caption,

Five hotels in Leeds are being used to house asylum seekers

Unaccompanied children who arrive in the country are meant to be placed in the care of a local council.

The report states: "At the point of arrival, the Home Office, in their view, have assessed everyone as an 'adult' to ensure that when dispersed they are not moving unaccompanied children.

"However, upon arrival in Leeds the hotels' welfare officers are raising concerns when they suspect some individuals are children."

According to the report, in 2023 Children's Services received 35 referrals raising concerns about the assessed age of some individuals.

The report states that using the "available guidance" they deemed 30 out of 35 individuals to be under 18.

As a result, those individuals were removed from hotels and placed into the care of the local authority, the council said.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, five hotels in Leeds are being used to house asylum seekers, providing a total of 400 beds. The council report says the Home Office had recently decided to double that capacity.

The report adds: "Children's Services can therefore safely assume that there is likely to be a significant increase of unaccompanied children dispersed into those hotels who have been wrongly assessed as over 18 years of age."

'Hasty decision-making'

A Home Office spokesperson said: "It's vital that we remove incentives for adults to pretend to be children to remain in the UK - in the year ending June 2023, 49% of asylum applicants whose age was disputed were found to be adults.

"Given the very difficult task of assessing someone's age, we are also considering introducing scientific age assessment methods to widen the evidence available to decision-makers and improve their decisions."

A Refugee Council spokesperson said: "We support many children in the asylum system who are disbelieved about their age.

"As a result of hasty decision-making that sees the Home Office mistaking them for adults, hundreds of refugee children are at risk of abuse and neglect. No child should be denied the support they need or forced to live with adult strangers in asylum accommodation, where they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

"These are children who simply want to start rebuilding their lives after the traumatic experiences they have been through."

Without the Brexit glue, support for the Conservative Party is coming unstuck


31 Aug 2023
AUTHOR
Sophie Stowers


Sophie Stowers analyses UK in a Changing Europe’s latest polling on public attitudes towards Brexit with Redfield and Wilton. She highlights that keeping the Conservative Party’s 2019 coalition of voters together will be difficult given that the salience of Brexit has diminished, and the government isn’t seen to have managed withdrawal from the EU well.

The performance of the Conservative Party in 2019 was notable not just for the number of seats won (up 48 from 2017), but where these where gained. In knocking down the so-called ‘red wall’, the Conservatives did not just advance in parts of the country that had been Labour for decades, but brought together a group of voters that, in any other election, would never coalesce.

Boris Johnson’s electoral coalition was socioeconomically disparate, split on social values, and scattered across the country. But they were united by one issue: Brexit. Going into that election, 63% of voters said Brexit was one of the most important issues facing the country. The Conservatives managed to monopolise the support of Leave voters, increasing their vote share in new Leave-voting constituencies, whilst simultaneously keeping hold of almost all the Brexiteers that had supported them in 2017.

Yet the victory was always something of a mixed blessing. As long as Brexit was the issue of the day, the coalition held together. But as Coronavirus, concerns about the cost of living and rising inequality, and an inflationary crisis came to the fore, it began to crumble.

As our last round of polling with Redfield and Wilton showed, the salience of Brexit has diminished. Not only that, but attachment to Leave/Remain identities has weakened.

It is in this context that the divergent economic preferences of the 2019 coalition have revealed themselves, with voters – and Tory backbenchers – split about the path the government should take on the economy. With no Brexit ‘glue’, Leave voters are no longer wedded to the Conservative Party. Indeed, our new polling with Redfield and Wilton shows a declining attachment to the Tories.



With the Conservatives already lagging behind Labour in national polls, reinvigorating the 2019 electoral coalition could be key to the party’s chances of success at the next election. But what can they do to hold on to the ‘red wall’?

The most obvious option is to start banging on about Brexit again. Though the issue has declined in salience for the public as a whole, many Leave voters (57%) and 2019 Conservative voters (63%) cite the issue as either ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ important when it comes to choosing who they will vote for at the next general election.

Moreover, almost a third of 2019 Conservative voters think Labour wants a closer relationship with the EU (38% even think that Labour wants to ultimately re-join). The (admittedly quiet) noises Labour has made about closer cooperation with the EU could be weaponised during an election campaign.

Yet there are two faults with this strategy. First, while Brexit is undoubtedly important to 2019 Conservatives, it still lags behind healthcare, housing and education: domestic issues are the priority, as with the wider public. To go ‘all out’ on Brexit could simply make the government seem out-of-touch.

Second, many 2019 Conservative voters – and Leave voters in general – aren’t exactly delighted with how the government has handled Brexit. 57% of Leavers either disapprove of, or are neutral about, the government’s approach. Our polling with Public First shows that just 18% Leave voters would say Brexit has gone ‘well’ or ‘very well’.

And, when asked how the UK has changed since we left the European Union, 2019 Conservative voters are more likely to think that the economy, quality of the NHS, and the cost of living in the UK have deteriorated. Drawing attention to Brexit when a sizeable portion of the 2019 coalition do not think it has been a positive thing for the country is hardly likely to bolster support. Brexit is not the political gift it once was.



In fact, our polling reveals that voters who think that a) the economy is weaker post-Brexit, b) that the NHS has got worse after leaving the EU, and c) that the cost-of-living crisis has been worse than it would have been within the EU are all more likely to say they will vote for Labour than Conservatives at the next election.

So, maybe Brexit is not the issue to draw attention to. But it is true that there are other specific policies which motivate 2019 Conservatives, which could be used instead. For example, our polling shows that crime and immigration are two areas of particular concern. The latter, on the face of it, seems an obvious issue for the Conservatives to push to mobilise this group; it was a key theme of the referendum, and more stringent migration controls are seen by 45% as a key advantage of Brexit.

More widely, it’s another issue to beat Labour with; a third of this group think Labour wants to increase immigration to the UK. Exploiting this issue could be a way to pull back the support of those 2019 Conservatives who, post-Brexit, have shifted back to Labour.

Yet, again, the Conservatives don’t necessarily perform well on this issue. 62% of 2019 Conservative voters think illegal immigration – a particular bugbear for Tory voters – has increased over the last seven years. This, alongside continuous blunders on this issue like the failure of the Rwanda scheme, or the evacuation of the Bibby Stockholm, means that for many voters, the Conservatives don’t seem to have ‘taken back control’ of the UK’s borders.

Indeed, our polling shows that this issue is not a vote winner for the Conservatives: 63% of those who think immigration is a ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ important issue are leaning towards voting Labour at the next election.

And unfortunately for the Conservatives, this is a pattern that is being repeated on other issues. Our data shows that, on issues voters find ‘very’ important, there is a preference towards a Labour government over a Conservative one. This leaves very few issues for the Conservatives to ‘snatch back’ and monopolise to reinvigorate their 2019 coalition.



There’s a hard slog ahead for the Conservatives. The electoral coalition that led to their victory at the last election may work to their detriment in 2024. At the next election, it seems unlikely that the 2019 coalition will be sharing the same policy priorities, nor voting for the same party.

By Sophie Stowers, researcher, UK in a Changing Europe.

You can download the August 2023 Brexit tracker data tables in full here.

Women’s chess master claims she was raped at tournament

Sabrina Chevannes said discrimination has taken place at every chess tournament she has ever attended

Maya Oppenheim

Women’s Correspondent

2 days ago

Sabrina Chevannes, a women’s international chess master, says sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination against women has taken place at every chess tournament she has ever attended

(Sabrina Chevannes)

A prominent women’s chess player has accused a fellow player of rape and sexual harassment as she warned a “toxic culture“ of misogyny and sexually predatory behaviour plagues the chess community.

Sabrina Chevannes, a women’s international chess master, said she was raped at a chess tournament by another contestant.

The 36-year-old, who quit professional chess in January 2017, told The Independent the incident happened when she was blackout drunk as a teenager

She added: “I woke up in the linen room of the hotel on a table. I was in so much pain. I didn’t quite understand what had happened.

“While playing chess I was in so much pain I could barely sit down. Him and his friends were high-fiving about it.”

Ms Chevannes, who won 10 British chess titles, said sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination against women has taken place at every chess tournament she has ever attended.

She has endured racism from fellow chess players, with people often assuming she had cheated when she did well in tournaments, she added.

She also told of an incident at a chess tournament when a man who was a chess master groped her.

“I was 11 years old,” she recalled. “I wanted to have a picture with him because he was famous in this world. He posed for the picture but did this thing where he put his hand down my back touching my butt. Then he turned around and winked at me.”

Have you been affected by this story? Email maya.oppenheim@independent.co.uk

She encountered him again at another chess event when she was a teenager where he told her he had seen her on the front of a chess magazine, she added.

“He said, ‘You are developing so well’. I said, ‘I was at my best rating’, and he said, ‘No, I don’t mean developing like that’,” Ms Chevannes recalled.

“He said he may need another copy of the magazine as he said he had worn his down with all the night-time reading. He looked at me in a creepy, lecherous manner. When he met me when I was 18, he said ‘now you are legal in all countries’.”

Chevannes said police are now looking into her allegations

(Sabrina Chevannes)

The former player said she would actively avoid tournaments where he was playing. She noted he sexually propositioned her a few years ago – asking her to go back to his hotel room.

Ms Chevannes said: “He used very racist, misogynistic language to my face.”

She told of another incident where a different chess player offered to let her sleep in his hotel room as she was tired from her flight but couldn’t check into her room until mid-afternoon.

“He wasn’t in the room when I was sleeping but I woke up to find one hand down my pants and one hand in my bra,” she added. “He did the same thing again when I was in the same house as him and lots of others in the chess community.”

Ms Chevannes, who now coaches chess, said she did not report any of the incidents to the police at the time as others warned her she would not be believed.

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But she added that social media posts she recently shared about her alleged experiences had been seen by the police who are now looking into her claims.

Other female chess players have come forward in recent weeks to make allegations of sexual assault, violence and harassment from male players.

Earlier in the month, 14 of France’s top female players wrote an open letter, “denouncing the sexist or sexual violence they have suffered” in the chess community, with over 100 women in chess signing the letter in the space of only five days.

Ms Chevannes described the chess community as an “insular world” with a rigid hierarchy where people are judged by their chess abilities and women are perpetually belittled.

“Women are seen as inferior, they genuinely believe men are superior to women in every way – including intellectually,” she added. “If you beat someone, it’s described as you raped them.”

 

UK 

MPs call for magic mushrooms and psychedelic drugs to be downgraded

Cross-party committee also backs wider use of cannabis for medicinal use and drug ‘consumption rooms’

Adam Forrest

2 days ago

Psilocybin mushrooms, aka magic mushrooms

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs should be reclassified as “a matter of urgency” to support clinical research into medical and therapeutic treatment, a group of influential MPs have said.

A report by the home affairs committee said there was a “growing body of evidence” that suggests psychedelics – and psilocybin in particular – may have therapeutic benefits, including treating depression and PTSD.

The cross-party group recommended that Rishi Sunak’s government downgrades the class A psychedelic drugs from Schedule 1 to schedule 2 so academics can test the “therapeutic value” more easily.

The powerful committee backed greater provision of cannabis-based products for medicinal use – though it stopped short of saying cannabis should be legalised or regulated for non-medical use.

The cross-party group of MPs also concluded recommended the use of safe spaces across the UK for users to take heroin and other substances in “consumption rooms” under medical supervision – along with greater testing at festivals.

The Scottish government has been pressing for a so-called safe consumption facility to be set up, with efforts on this having so far been blocked by Westminster.

But the home affairs committee recommended that a pilot in Glasgow is supported by Westminster and jointly funded by both governments.

If Rishi Sunak’s government remains unwilling to support the pilot, the power to establish it should be devolved to the Scottish government, the committee said.

More widely, the MPs recommended pilots of such facilities – where heroin users and other addicts can take substances under medical supervision with the aim that the environment will help prevent overdoses – in parts of the UK where local government deem there is a need.

Drug deaths in Scotland have been a consistent scandal in recent years

(PA Archive)

Figures published last week revealed Scotland’s largest ever fall in drug deaths, with data showing a total of 1,051 deaths due to drug misuse in 2022 – a drop of 279 on the previous year.

But while the number of deaths linked to drugs misuse is now at the lowest it has been since 2017, the official report made clear that the rate of deaths is still “much higher” than it was when recording the data began in 1996.

MPs said the pilot on the bold move “must be evaluated in order to establish a reliable evidence base on the utility of a safe consumption facility in the UK”.

Responding to the recommendation on consumption rooms, the Sunak government insisted “there is no safe way to take illegal drugs” and they have “no plans to consider” the idea.

Additionally, the MPs said on-site drug checking services at temporary events like music festivals and within the night-time economy should be rolled out, recommending that the Home Office “establish a dedicated licensing scheme for drug checking at such events before the start of the summer 2024 festival season”.

Labour MP Diana Johnson leads home affairs committee

(PA)

The report stated that existing classifications of controlled substances should be reviewed by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to ensure they accurately reflect the risk of harm, with further reviews every 10 years.

While welcoming the 10-year drug strategy’s commitment to tackling county lines, the committee said the government can “go further to prevent children and young people from becoming exploited”.

Committee chairwoman, Dame Diana Johnson said: “The criminal justice system will need to continue to do all it can to break up the criminal gangs that drive the trade in illicit drugs. However, it must also recognise that many children and young people involved need to be supported to escape not punished for their involvement.”

She added: “Fundamentally, we need to have the right interventions in place to help people break free from the terrible cycles of addiction and criminality that drug addiction can cause. Simply attempting to remove drugs from people’s lives hasn’t worked.”

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A Home Office spokesperson said: “There is no safe way to take illegal drugs, which devastate lives, ruin families and damage communities, and we have no plans to consider this.”

The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) said many commissioners |will not, however, feel that they can support approaches that they see as facilitating illegal drug use, such as drug consumption rooms and pill testing, and they therefore support the current legal position”.

 

UK Report finds worsening violations of disabled people’s rights

AUGUST 28, 2023LABOUR HUB 

UK Deaf and disabled people’s organisations have today launched a scathing report evaluating the government’s performance seven years on from a United Nations finding of grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights due to austerity and welfare reform.

Kamran Mallick, Chief Executive of Disability Rights UK said: “The evidence is clear: the situation has worsened for disabled people since the report in 2016. Disabled people have and continue to pay with their lives.

“The UK Government has made no attempt to respond in a positive way to the findings, and time and again refuses to engage with Disabled people and our organisations in a meaningful way.”

The findings published in November 2016 were the outcome of a special inquiry initiated by the United Nations Committee responsible for the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People.

The new report compiled as written evidence for a follow-up by the Committee describes how disabled people’s living standards have deteriorated further since 2016.

Continued cuts to support for disabled people living in the community have led to them becoming segregated away from society within their own homes.

A recent report by a disabled people-led Commission in Lewisham found that 20% of respondents didn’t always have access to food and drink, could not wash (or be washed) regularly and couldn’t go to the toilet when needed.

Social care charging is pushing thousands into debt or forcing disabled people to pull out of support they need. The last comprehensive research undertaken found 166,000 disabled people in social care arrears to their local council. A recent BBC investigation found 60,000 disabled people had debt proceedings started against them by their government.

“We are living in dire circumstances,” said Dr Jim Elder-Woodward, Convenor of Inclusion Scotland, “isolated, trapped at home or in institutions; cold, hungry, and humiliated. Despite the Scottish Government saying they want to hear from those ‘with lived experience’ in the development of their plans and policies, our human rights continue to be denied.”

Added to further regression under issues originally investigated by the inquiry, disabled people have now also experienced adverse consequences from Brexit exacerbating the social care recruitment crisis, and been disproportionately hit by both Covid and the current cost of living crisis.

Megan Thomas, Policy and Research Officer at Disability Wales said: “The high levels of poverty in Wales, the cost-of-living crisis, and the aftermath of Covid-19 have resulted in disabled people not having access to suitable accommodation, not being able to enjoy their right to the support they need, and in some cases, disabled people have lost their lives.”

The political crisis in Northern Ireland is yet another factor causing avoidable harm to disabled people: the austerity budget imposed on Northern Ireland in response to its lack of government will see services and funding for disabled people slashed.

Nual Toman, head of policy at Disability Action said: “The inadequate budget allocated to Northern Ireland from Westminster has resulted in a severe cuts programme which is shredding public services at an alarming rate with a severe and disproportionate impact on disabled people.

“The cost of living emergency combined with inadequate disability benefits and barriers in accessing work have resulted in increasing numbers of disabled people becoming reliant on food banks.

“All of this is occurring in the absence of a functioning government. Urgent action is required to protect the lives and rights of disabled people.”

The report also highlights the serious threat of further grave and systematic rights violations posed by recent plans announced by the government to intensify and expand the benefit sanctions regime and to scrap the current system of out of work benefits for disabled people unable to earn a living through paid employment.

Around 632,000 disabled people are at risk of losing essential income as a result of these plans.

More than a quarter of those who will be affected by the introduction of in-work conditionality – where claimants on low incomes in receipt of benefit top-ups will be required to look for higher paid jobs or more hours of work under threat of benefit stoppages if they do not comply – are disabled.

Many of these low-paid workers will struggle to increase their working hours and/or face barriers to the job search activities they will be required to undertake, such as digital exclusion.

The launch of the report has been timed to coincide with the Committee hearing evidence in Geneva from UK Deaf and disabled representatives and UK Equality and Human Rights Commissions. The UK government has decided not to attend.

John McArdle, founder of the Black Triangle campaign, said: “The government won’t attend because they haven’t got a hope of putting up a credible defence as they seek to compound their abuses and abrogation of the Convention.

“Rather than working with disabled people to ensure a rigorous and safe system that doesn’t cause avoidable harm to the most disadvantaged members of society, it has made its decision to scrap the Work Capability Assessment and replace it with a system that is guaranteed to be far, far worse and lethal.”

The report follows publication last week by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commissions of their own evaluation which found the government has made little or no progress on each of the Committee’s eleven recommendations.

The report is available here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lccr/2865509591. Creator: The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Is “radical tinkering” enough?

Mike Phipps reviews When nothing works: From cost of living to foundational liveability, by Luca Calafati, Julie Froud, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and Karel Williams, published by Manchester University Press

AUGUST 31, 2023LABOUR HUB 

In a recent poll, 57% of the British electorate – including half of all Conservative voters – agreed with the statement ‘”nothing in Britain works anymore”. Only 19% disagreed. The verdict of course is vague: it covers NHS waiting lists, transport infrastructure, our education system, the state of our parks, the energy sector and much else. Right wing tabloid journalists compile a different list, from the criminal justice system to immigration controls.

The authors of this book trace the origin of the problem to the UK’s  pursuit of “a fantasy of market citizenship” which resulted in low wages and the rise of in-work benefits for an increasing proportion of economically active households who now receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. At the same time, “state underfunding has slowly undermined and distorted essential service provision.”

In a case study, the authors examine the NHS, where underfunding and wage cuts exacerbate a recruitment and retention crisis – as in many other parts of the public sector – but where additionally privatisation and reorganisations have “reconfigured key parts of the NHS so that they are unfit for health system purposes.”

A root cause of these failings is the shift in the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of the latter over the last fifty years, caused by the cumulative impact of weakened trade unions, growing privatisation and outsourcing and deregulated finance – “a rentier machine for rationing investment and extracting cash”.

“Britain needs a pay rise,” says the Trade Union Congress. But for low income households, this is only part of the solution, suggests this book: “Each extra one pound of wages turns into about 30 pence of disposable income for those who not only pay tax on their wage increase but also lose Universal Credit.” A reform of the “predatory” tax and benefit system is also required, plus big improvements in Britain’s social infrastructure. An immediate priority is reversing the austerity cuts of the 2010s in central government grants to local authorities.

“Quagmire politics”

This book proposes a new economic diagnosis and political approach to the UK’s problems: a break from the consensus “quagmire politics” and its objectives of faster growth and higher wages. In fact, faster growth is unattainable, argue the authors, “because the UK’s growth rate is declining and there is no evidence that technocratic centrist or free market supply side economic policies can shift the country onto a higher growth trajectory.”

But the aim of faster growth is not just unattainable, without a fundamental break from mainstream policies; it is also misconceived, insofar as faster growth aggravates the climate emergency. This is true even of ‘green growth’, claim the authors: the evidence suggests it’s simply not possible to decouple economic growth from environmental damage. The conclusion is inescapable: to achieve the necessary reductions in emissions, we will need to scale down aggregate economic activity. Fearing the electoral unpopularity of this message, few mainstream politicians are willing to articulate it.

On the face of it, the empirical evidence for this is insurmountable. Research suggests that every percent of growth raises emissions by a percent, because of the energy required to generate economic activity. But understanding this also indicates a potential solution: not all economic activity is equally energy-guzzling, and not all energy sources contribute the same amount of carbon emissions. In short, as one study puts it, “Clean up first, and then invest in development.”

A new framework

To address all these problems, the authors propose a new “foundational liveability framework”. This would end the focus on gross domestic product as the key measurement and would use instead household living standards as the basic unit of analysis. Liveability, argue the authors, “has been undermined by the crumbling of each of its three supporting pillars: essential services, social infrastructure and residual income. This is the result of the failed market citizenship project which has attempted to boost individual consumption at the expense of collective provision.”

This re-framing puts centre-stage a debate about universal basic services, universal basic income and even universal basic infrastructure which have been separately canvassed in the last few years.

The authors rightly bemoan the existing political consensus, but then suggest that several  constraints on an incoming Labour Government are likely to prevent a radical policy departure. “The room for fiscal expansionism will be limited by trade deficit and the debt to GDP ratio, while an independent Bank of England with a narrow remit will control monetary policy,” they argue. Some privatisation could be reversed, but the state has lost the capacity to run large-scale infrastructure projects and anyway regulation would be cheaper. An incremental approach would apparently work best, especially as voters are supposedly slow to grasp big economic ideas.

Thus the authors focus on “adaptive reuse which delivers slow, steady progress” and “starter and stealth policies.” These, they admit, “could be disparaged as tinkering, but sustained, purposive, broad front, radical tinkering is what adaptive reuse is all about.”

I’m not so sure. Of course, there is a sound logic to, for example, taking the best from local and regional government and rolling it out nationally. But the pragmatism and innovation that produced some excellent local initiatives were born of necessity amid severe financial constraints: a national government with a strong mandate should not be hamstrung in the same way. The caution advocated here could well backfire at a subsequent election, when a Starmer government, like New Labour before it, starts to lose the goodwill of voters increasingly impatient for change.

“Paradigm change is beyond this team of authors,” they declare in the Introduction. But if nothing really does work in contemporary Britain, isn’t that precisely what is needed?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

ENDING THE ARTWASH

31 August 2023
Culture
Britain


A decade-long movement has largely dismantled fossil fuel sponsorships in the culture sector. Danny Chivers reports about how activism and international solidarity reshaped industry dynamics – and public sentiment.

Standing firm against BP sponsorship of British Museum’s ‘Troy’ exhibition on 8 February 2020. Hundreds of activists trying to end the artwash were also joined by a giant Trojan horse.

 IMAGEPLOTTER/ALAMY

Ten years ago, the UK arts and culture scene was awash with oil company logos. From the BP Portrait Award to the Shell-sponsored Southbank Centre in London, the industry was deeply embedded in the most high-profile arts institutions.

Today, things look very different. Earlier this year, it was confirmed that BP’s deals with the Royal Opera House and British Museum have ended, meaning the oil industry has now been almost entirely swept away from the UK culture sector. At least 15 cultural institutions have shuttered their oil partnerships in the last 10 years.

GREENWASH

By sponsoring theatres, museums and concert halls, the fossil fuel industry had been able to hide its destructive activities behind a friendly façade of arts and education. High-profile arts partnerships also ensured access to elites and decision-makers.

At the British Museum, for example, BP frequently sponsored exhibitions linked to countries where it operates. This allowed company executives to schmooze government officials from Mexico, Egypt, Russia or Iraq at exclusive exhibition launch parties, turning the (publicly-funded) British Museum into a space for BP to lobby for more drilling opportunities. In return, BP made sponsorship payments worth less than 0.5 per cent of the museum’s annual budget.

Many of the communities on the frontlines of oil extraction and climate change are the very same communities with colonially-looted artefacts in its vaults.

Resistance to these deals stretches back to 2004, when the campaign group London Rising Tide began targeting the BP Portrait Award. Things stepped up a gear in 2010 when the arts collective Liberate Tate began using creative interventions to challenge BP sponsorship of the galleries; and again in 2012, when a group of theatre-lovers (including me) started creating Shakespearean stage invasions before BP-branded plays put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This rebel theatre troupe became BP or not BP?, and went on to create around 70 impromptu performances in 11 different oil-sponsored institutions, involving giant props, creative blockades and thousands of people.

Campaigning research groups Platform and Culture Unstained exposed the dirty details of the oil companies’ arts sponsorship deals and built support from high-profile artists and performers, while arts and culture workers organized against the fossil fuel deals through the Public and Commercial Services Union Union and Culture Declares Emergency.

Ironically, the BP-sponsored British Museum provided a powerful opportunity for international solidarity. Many of the communities on the frontlines of oil extraction and climate change are the very same communities with colonially-looted artefacts in its vaults. By teaming up with activists and performers from Mexico, Colombia, West Papua, Iraq and Indigenous Australia, groups were able to highlight these connections and subvert BP’s sponsored exhibitions to tell more honest stories.

SHIFT IN PUBLIC OPINION

This broad-based, collaborative campaign has succeeded in almost completely eradicating oil industry partnerships from UK arts and culture. Alongside a wider ecosystem of actions and campaigns against the fossil fuel sector, these successes may have helped to drive a wider shift. Public opinion in recent years has swung firmly against the oil industry.

The UN climate talks refused direct sponsorship from fossil fuel companies for the first time in Glasgow in 2021, and the British LGBT Awards dropped BP and Shell sponsorship following protests in 2023. Parallel movements to end fossil fuel arts partnerships are picking up pace around the world, with major victories recently in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia.

Of course, there is still more work to do. The London Science Museum still has four fossil fuel partners, including the coal-mining giant Adani. The British Museum, which still has a BP Lecture Theatre, hasn’t ruled out future fossil fuel partnerships and is yet to properly address its colonial legacy.

The UK Art Not Oil movement shows the impact that a determined campaign of creativity, solidarity, and strategic direct action can have. Could it be a model for future victories over the fossil fuel industry?

This article is from the September-October 2023 issue of New Internationalist.