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EX-CHANCELLOR George Osborne’s appointment today as the new British Museum chairman was met with outrage.
The former MP will join trustees as of September 1 and step into his new role on October 4, the museum said.
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “George Osborne as chancellor was the architect of devastating cuts to the arts and to culture.
“He is in no way an appropriate choice for a position at one of our country’s leading cultural and historical institutions, and the man has more than enough jobs already.”
Culture Unstained, the campaign group to end oil sponsorship of culture, tweeted: “As Chancellor, [Mr Osborne] gave huge tax breaks to oil firms like BP — with the aim of maximising the amount of oil and gas they would extract from the North Sea — as well as companies intent on fracking across the British countryside.
“The British Museum urgently needed a chair with the experience to meaningfully engage with colonial legacies and climate change.
“Instead, it has chosen yet another establishment white man whose main experience of the museums sector is decimating it.”
PCS Southbank Centre branch said Mr Osborne, who “oversaw an austerity regime that stripped our cultural institutions to the bone and made them reliant on their shops, cafes and dubious corporate sponsors” should be “nowhere near public life.”
