The protesters who tried to disrupt the Pink Ball at the British Museum last week have not written to me for my agony aunt advice. But had they done so, I imagine their letter might have sounded something like this:
Dear Philippa,
On the night of the British Museum’s Pink Ball Gala, its own version of the annual Met Gala in New York, a glamorous fundraiser of black ties, tiaras and taffeta, we protested outside, calling on the museum to cut its ties with BP. Yet still they show no signs of doing this.
How can an institution that claims to protect history keep taking money from a company that is destroying the planet? It is a stain on everything they say they stand for.
BP uses the museum’s name to polish its reputation, to make itself look respectable while continuing to profit from war, pollution and exploitation. And yet the great and the good strolled past us towards gaiety and champagne.
But how can we be quiet when the truth is so clear? We are on the side of what’s right. They are complicit in harm. It shouldn’t even be a debate. How do we make the world wake up?
Yours,
The Protesters
Dear Protesters,
I can see how painful it must be to be pushed behind barriers while the party goes on inside. When you believe something is wrong, silence can feel like complicity. I understand that fury, that restless need to act, to shake people awake.
It’s hard to sit with the sense that others are carrying on as normal while you are alive with outrage. You can see the connections so clearly: the sponsorship, the oil, the money. When others appear to look away, out of convenience or denial, it can feel unbearable.
And you are right about much of it. BP is not just another energy company. They are among the worst offenders when it comes to disbursing profits to shareholders instead of investing meaningfully in renewables. The gap between their public climate pledges and their actual spending is vast. Your anger, then, is not misplaced.
But what is happening here? Part of what group protest gives us is belonging. It offers a sense of community and purpose. When the world feels indifferent, standing among others who share your conviction is reassuring. Yet belonging also has its risks. The stronger the identity of a group, the more we define ourselves by what we oppose. Shouting against something isn’t always the same as building something better.
When I was training in couples counselling, one maxim we learned was: don’t make a complaint without a recommendation for change. To put it more bluntly, complaining about a problem without posing a solution is just whining. Protesting BP’s sponsorship of the British Museum without suggesting viable alternatives can sound like accusation, and when people feel accused, they stop listening. And as in relationships, communication, not condemnation, is what changes things.
The British Museum is shut down while activists peacefully protest in the courtyard on the 1st of June 2024, London. Photo: Kristian Buus / Getty
If you are going to damn an institution, try also to imagine what you would do in its place. What would a non-corporate, non-hypocritical museum look like? How would it fund its exhibitions without sponsors like BP? The answers are difficult, but that doesn’t make the questions wrong. It just means they are hard to solve.
When I was a trainee manager at McDonald’s, I was sent to Hamburger University, where I learned something useful about human psychology: if you want to change behaviour, reward what people are doing right. Ignore the bad and highlight the good. It’s a principle that works in parenting too. Praise what’s improving, and you’ll see more of it.
I was at the ball too and I learnt from Sadiq Khan that night that his administration, for instance, has almost halved roadside nitrogen dioxide in London since 2016. A remarkable achievement that gets little attention. We could do with more praise for genuine progress and less despair that nothing is changing.
This next bit may be hard to hear, but when we point the finger, we can sometimes seem to be taking the moral high ground. It’s an old psychological trick to manage shame or helplessness: if I can cast someone else as bad, I can feel good. But the truth is, very few people or institutions are purely good or bad. BP’s oil runs buses, fuels ambulances, and keeps hospital generators working. That’s the knot we’re all in, the same system we want to condemn.
Feeling offended doesn’t make us right. Our feelings are true, but the stories we attach to them often are not. The world’s energy system is a tangle of contradictions. The drive to net zero has made electricity more expensive in Britain while China is still building hundreds of coal-fired plants. It’s easier to shout at a museum’s gala than to sit with the scale of that complexity. If you want people to listen, do what the best parents and teachers do: praise what’s improving, suggest what could be better, and remember that change rarely comes from humiliation. People listen when they feel seen, not when they feel shamed. Shouting often pushes them further away.
That said, protest does matter. It has always been a way to draw public attention to injustice and to push institutions to move faster. Without protest, we would have no votes for women and no civil rights movement. But the most effective protests have always combined outrage with imagination — shouting for what we want, not just what we reject.
You are not wrong to care, or to act. But the real power of protest comes not from declaring who is bad and who is good, but from recognising how complicated our shared systems are and encouraging those who are trying, and when we damn something, we need to offer a viable alternative. How should the British Museum fund its special exhibitions if BP is not to do it?
With best wishes,
Philippa
Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist, writer and broadcaster. Her Ask Philippa advice column is on Substack