BP Should Pay RSC More

While activists might feel flushed with victory, they have damaged the funding sources of the RSC without offering a credible alternative.

I can only imagine that a sound like an airplane loo flushing went around the auditorium, there was so much indrawing of breath, after Richard Dawkins admitted that maybe God wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Speaking at Cheltenham Literature festival Dawkins told the audience about an honesty box to pay for coffee that one of his former students had installed at their research lab.

“They help themselves to coffee and they are supposed to put money in the box and each week the honesty box takes in less than the amount of coffee taken”. When a pair of eyes were drawn on the box, however, the takings for the next week were much higher.” He wondered whether without a “divine spy camera in the sky reading their every thought” people would be more willing to do wrong.

While not much of a story in itself, it does highlight an important point. Guilt, while not the most popular emotion these days, can be a great force for good when it drives people to behave better.

The Royal Shakespeare company has recently halted a partnership with BP that funded subsidised £5 16-25 youth tickets to all performances after coming under sustained pressure from climate organisations such as To BP Or Not BP, youth groups and the resignation of Mark Rylance on environmental and BP divestment grounds.

In his resignation letter, Rylance explained that the sponsorship gave BP a blank cheque to continue polluting by allowing it to “obscure the destructive reality of its activities” through philanthropic and arts funding.

“I do not wish to be associated with BP any more than I would with an arms dealer, a tobacco salesman or anyone who wilfully destroys the lives of others alive and unborn. Nor, I believe, would William Shakespeare,”

While my inner curmudgeon instinctively reacts against this and scoffs at his historical revisionism the facts of the case speak for themselves.

BP is the 6th most polluting company in the world, pumping out 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, they have actively lobbied the Trump administration to expand oil exploration and drilling in the Arctic and have propped up and traded with regimes which have been accused of serious human rights violations in Azerbaijan, Algeria, Libya, Indonesia, and other countries. This is on top of the ecological damage caused by disasters such as the Deepwater horizon drilling rig explosion which released just under 200 million gallons into the ocean – the largest marine oil accident in US history. Despite all this, in 2018 BP’s profit rose to a five-year high of $12.7 billion, double the previous year’s $6.17 billion.

The RSC sponsorship on the other hand is thought to make up only 0.6% of the RSC budget and combined sponsorship to the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company amounted to only £7.5 million over five years.

The small size of the sponsorship deal is at odds with the positive effect that these sponsorship deals can have for BP’s reputation. At an AGM in 2012, BP admitted that sponsorship deals go through “exactly the same processes as we would for any investment”. Furthermore, research by sponsorship specialist Havas Sports & Entertainment showed that of the people aware of BP’s sponsorship of the Olympic games 38% believed BP that had been getting better at working towards a cleaner planet. Importantly, this was in 2012, only a year after Deepwater Horizon.

The point is that BP clearly understands the value of sponsorship deals when it comes to improving their image. Institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company haven’t realised and are therefore selling themselves short. To return to the example that began this article rather than putting the correct amount of money into the arts and culture honesty box to offset the harm that they do BP has managed to get themselves into a situation where they toss a few pennies onto the floor and everyone thanks them for their generous contribution.

By cutting off funding deals with BP the RSC has made the first step, recognising the error of providing reputational relief to companies at such a low rate. However, this doesn’t address the funding hole that this will leave. Proposals for the government to make up the difference are naïve at best.

Instead, our cultural institutions should recognise the value of a sponsorship deal and charge for them correctly. Just like carbon offsetting places a financial cost on companies that are polluting by charging them per ton of CO2, providing a financial incentive to decrease emissions, companies trying to repair their reputation should have to pay dearly for it.

While forcing the RSC to bow under pressure might give the activists involved in the campaign a rush of pleasure, they should not feel that they have advanced the cause of environmentalism. Instead, BP just has more money and a valuable institution has less.

Rather than disassociate themselves from BP the RSC should simply remove the BP logo from their tickets and website and continue to accept the money. If BP complains, the RSC should simply explain that BP adversely affects the reputation of the RSC and that if they wish to associate themselves with some of Britain’s most important cultural institutions, they must either pay more or improve their reputations.

If we keep our eyes on BP, acting as the judges that refuse to engage with them unless they improve their behaviour, maybe BP can be forced to put a couple more pounds into the pot.