US greed fuels oil disaster
TONY Hayward of BP might as well have had an appointment in the headmaster’s study as on Capitol Hill yesterday.
He was always going to get a caning from US Congressmen playing to the gallery. Cheap lines about taking his “golden parachute back to England” revealed the anti-British prejudice that was at work.
Clearly BP has made mistakes over the Gulf oil spill. But BP is a multinational company that just happens to have British origins and many British shareholders.
If there is a genuinely national dimension to the crisis then it is this: the insatiable demand for oil of the American lifestyle is what has prompted the need for so much inherently risky deep water drilling.
Until the Americans take action to curtail this demand then their complaints amount to nothing more than the squealing of hypocrites.