Bash BP but don’t bash Great Britain

At the recent hearings in the US to discuss the BP oil disaster a woman in the crowd screamed a protest and asked what the Queen of England was doing about it.

Changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in the wake of September 11th

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Author: oldmovieguy

Another Boomer who wishes he had the stamina of youth to go with the cash of age. Fond of pricking the hot air balloons of pomposity and cutting little dictaors down to size.

15 thoughts on “Bash BP but don’t bash Great Britain”

  3. One woman screams something about the Queen and it’s inflated into anti-British sentiment. Interesting. I haven’t noticed any anti-British sentiment here over the oil spill. The anger is all directed toward BP and oil companies in general, including American ones. And the people I know are all liberals: Democrats, I suppose, when it comes to elections. There was a rather funny skit done on NY-based Saturday Night Live.

  5. From what I can see on the news here, the British press has blown a very small quantity of adverse comments about the UK into mega proportions.
    Deliberate stirring. Most of the press is not anti UK and neither are the People.
    Most are pretty well against BP and they have not done themselves any favours at all.
    I actually watched the CEO of BP refuse to give an answer to the Congressional enquiry 65 times on CNN! Sat through the lot. Virtually denied any knowledge of it technically. quite ridiculous.
    I do think the UK press and media is totally out of control, quite hysterical, they need to calm down.
    I frequently read about the same incident in papers on both sides, you would hardly recognise them as the same incident sometimes, more like parallel universes. USA papers are far more sedate and accurate, too afraid of being sued.
    Try the Washington Post.

  6. In #3 I meant anti-British sentiment throughout the country, not just by a single ignorant lunatic in a crowd.

  7. A lot of the hysteria about the oil leak emanates from the White House unfortunately.

    Christina, I don’t find it surprising that the CEO of BP could not answer technical questions. All the technical stuff is down to Transocean and its American staff. This is the point he should have got across.

  8. sheona he had a row of engineers behind him, of course he could have answered some of the questions any idiot could have done! The lawyers had told him not to, went down like a lead balloon with the politicians as you could imagine, he just came across as shifty. Bad PR for BP.
    A complete misreading of the American psyche.

  9. Oh well, Bearsy, too bad. It was rather funny. I probably tried to link it from the wrong website.

  10. Point well made by the video clip, OMG.

    Load of hysterical nonsense from the US press.
    I don’t blame the CEO of BP for not answering. Talk about scapegoats!!

  11. ..or to clarify.

    I couldn’t care less about allocating blame at this point; I would rather they just all got together to sort this thing out.

    It is an ecological disaster, and political point scoring is just what we do not need.

  12. Has anyone seen this?

    Scientists last week revised their estimate of the number of barrels of oil leaking from the seabed each day from 20,000 to 40,000. A standard barrel of crude oil contains 35 gallons.

    Based on that measurement, there are almost 1.4 million gallons of oil being spewed from the seabed into the Gulf basin each day.

    This is the equivalent of around two-and-a-half Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of oil (a pool can hold approximately 550,000 gallons of water).

    By comparison, the Gulf of Mexico, the ninth largest body of water in the world, contains some 535 thousand billion gallons of water ā€“ equal to one billion Olympic pools.

  15. I watched some of Congressional hearings. The panel was comprised of a bunch of pseudo macho grandstanding wankers who were playing to the media and the electorate. Sentator Waxman not only looks a prat, he made damn sure the world knows he is a prat. What the hell did they expect Hayward to say? “It was me guv, I am the one that did it. Its all my fault and BP’s – who, by the way will pay every dime you ask for.” Of course he could not say anything. This saga has a long way to run and the lawyers have barely begun their feeding frenzy. There are other companies involved and other decisions that were made that will come to light. Blame will be placed and I have no doubt that Hayward and BP will take their fair share. But there are others too, including, I imagine, US government inspectors, not to mention the various co-owners and contractors.

    Obama and the democrats clearly want to see the break up of BP, so that their own US oil companies can pick up the pieces.

    It may be true that the sentiments expressed by that one woman are not typical of those felt by the rest of the country, but just as the President and US media have criticised Hayward for being insensitive in some of his remarks, so too is Obama guilty of the same sin when he pointedly called BP, British Petroleum a name it has not used for 15 years. It was perhaps only an oversight on his part that he did not call it The Anglo Iranian Oil Company.

    The President, members of Congress, the Senate and the media seem far more caught up in apportioning blame and making political capital than they do about trying to stop the leak. It was an expensive and dreadful accident, but ultimately inevitable, given the number of rigs that operate and the conditions under which they do so. You can bet your bottom dollar that every other oil company is saying, “there but for the grace of God…”.

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