Not British

Search any official document published by BP plc, the oil giant now battling not only to cap the Mexican Gulf oil spillage but to save itself from a terminal collapse of investor confidence, and you will not find anywhere the words ‘British Petroleum’.

Search any official document published by BP plc, the oil giant now battling not only to cap the Mexican Gulf oil spillage but to save itself from a terminal collapse of investor confidence, and you will not find anywhere the words ‘British Petroleum’. The full version of the company name was dropped more than a decade ago, when the merger with US oil giant Amoco turned it into a transnational conglomerate with the green-tinged but much-mocked slogan ‘Beyond Petroleum’.

One would not know this to listen to Barack Obama, who misses no opportunity to denounce ‘British Petroleum’ for the disaster which befell an American-owned, Korean-built rig leased by BP’s US subsidiary. It is as if a British pirate expedition had sailed over and drilled a wildcat well. As public anger rises, ‘British Petroleum’ is getting the blame. It is said in some quarters that Britain is now more unpopular in America than at any time since 1776.

Transocean, the owner of the destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig, relocated for tax reasons first to the Cayman Islands and then to Switzerland. Halliburton, the controversial Texan firm once chaired by George W. Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney, had a hand in the ‘cementing’ processes that failed to protect the rig against explosion. The US Coast Guard service has some explaining to do about whether its firefighting techniques made the subsequent containment exercise more difficult. The federal government’s actions in mobilising resources to minimise environmental damage have been judged by 60 per cent of recent Gallup poll respondents to be ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.