BP Political Blow-out

I continue to be shocked by how supine are reports about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by the world’s media.
I was pleased to see that President Obama’s brother was recently denied entry to Britain for being a criminal, a sanction that should equally apply to the President himself.
For the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far more political than environmental.
The current spill is not large in relative terms. Much more oil escapes into the Gulf of Mexico from natural fissures in the seabed each and every year, and has done for millions of years. A similar explosion on a rig owned by the Mexican Government in 1979 released at least three times as much oil in shallow water, some of which washed on to Texan shores.
The truth is, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is not just physically complex but is laced with more political corruption that in any other oil region -- more than Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Azerbaijan put together.
BP is well up to the task in all other regions of the world, but its exemplary safety standards are continually vetoed by it’s US subsidiary, backed by pressure from the local trades unions and oil services giant Halliburton (which has inappropriate influence within the US Government and to whom BP had subcontracted the drilling).
The Americans think they know best.
In any other part of the world the domino series of failures that led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion would just not have been allowed to develop. For that reason the American political establishment is fully culpable, and gives the Third World a bad name.
The US Government should be indemnifying British taxpayers and investors for losses incurred by BP, not the other way round.

Deepwater Horizon

I find the media reporting and reaction to the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico astoundingly amateur.
The resources being brought to bear by Sunbury-on-Thames based BP are truly remarkable.
In contrast the response of the American Government -- including their President -- is a complete joke. And the British Government could afford to show a bit of backbone and stick up for it’s economic interests.

BP has 1,100 vessels involved, and 22,000 people working on the containment exercise, including a whole series of largely experimental solutions until one cures the unprecedented problem. Whilst these methods worked successfully to plug the wells blown by Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, they’ve never been tried before at 5,000ft depth of water.
The final solution maybe another two months away when a relief well is able to plug the well bore 16,000 feet below the surface, with a backup relief well two weeks behind that, in case of any snag.
In fact all the skills needed to cure the problem are entirely within the private sector, and the almighty US Government is completely out of its depth.

Chasing Votes

I spent Friday evening chasing Spelthorne’s new Labour Parliamentary Candidate around Upper Halliford -- still wet behind the ears he hasn’t yet learnt to push his leaflets right through the letterbox.
He says he’s going to commute from Staines station -- interesting, as he doesn’t live here. He harks back to 1945 the last time Spelthorne voted Labour. A pity that the only person who remembered him call at their door was a Tory Party member. I’m glad he’s concentrating on Shepperton and Sunbury, areas where Spelthorne's third party rely so much on squeezing the Labour vote.
I found quite a few people interested in next week’s Open Primary to choose the Conservative Party candidate. Funny how people have different views about the same person, but that’s democracy. Gordon Brown isn’t completely written off, and there are worries whether Cameron is Thatcherite enough -- but that’s what they thought about Thatcher in 1978/9, before the word was invented!