I watched BP chief Tony Hayward getting grilled by US legislators last week and the first thought that occurred to me was…God, but these American legislators are ugly men. Their mouths seem to be locked in a permanent sneer, their teeth urgently need the attention of a skilled orthodontist and their lips slobber uncontrollably. My wife thought Tony Hayward looked like a hobbit which isn’t something he would want the 80000 odd employees of BP to agree with I suspect. Personally I thought he looked like a meek schoolboy being ticked off by the teacher and I also thought he was a bit too pathetic for a pommie CEO of one of the world’s largest companies. If I had been Hayward I would have given old slobber lips a bit of a run for his money and asked if he seriously expected me to know what was going on all the time in such a large multinational. To say that the questions from the US congressmen were naïve is to do a serious mis-justice to that word. The questions were mostly plain daft and had a lot more to do with coming mid term elections I reckon than they did with finding out what had gone wrong with the Deepwater Horizon rig or how to sort the problem out. Now, thanks to dithering President Obama and his slobber lipped legislators BP is being painted as an evil capitalist entity that puts profit before safety and really couldn’t give a damn about spilling 60000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

There has never, ever been an evil capitalist entity in the US that has put profit before safety or environmental considerations has there? Of course there has and that’s why old slobber lips and his hideous cronies should be told by the Brits to go off and reproduce. Putting $20 billion of shareholder’s fund into an escrow account to compensate those who have suffered from the oil gushing out of the sea bed may make US legislators believe that they have won a victory but it sets a dangerous precedent. At some stage the boot will be on the other foot and it will be a US registered company that has to pay out billions in compensation. Then they will be squealing like stuck pigs. What about McDonald’s putting $20 billion into an escrow account to compensate for all that oil they have spilled into people’s arteries over the years?

The most objectionable thing about the US attitude to the BP oil spill is the implication that it could have been avoided. The problems with pumping oil out of the sea bed are, I can only imagine, complex and immense. If the US wasn’t so in love with the automobile there probably wouldn’t be a need to pump quite as much oil or to have to look for it in ever more inaccessible places. But the US is one of the world’s largest users of oil and therefore share some of the responsibility for the leak. BP could quite reasonably argue that if the US didn’t have such an appetite for black gold then they wouldn’t be drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Quite why BP would want go to all the trouble and expense of setting up the Deepwater Horizon and then cut corners knowing the thing could blow up, belch oil into the sea and wipe billions off the share price of BP is beyond me. It’s an absurd suggestion and the slobber lips know as well as anyone else that this is simply a terrible accident. Just as the explosion of the Challenger 73 seconds after take off in 1986 was a terrible accident, and even though a faulty rubber seal was later suspected to be the cause nobody suggested then that an escrow account should be set up to compensate the victim’s families.

The problem in the US (apart from slobber lipped congressmen wanting their 15 minutes of Warholian fame) is the culture of where there’s blame there’s a claim. There’s money to be had from apportioning blame and this case could keep lawyers rich for decades to come. And what do you think most of the slobber lips do for a living? Well, my guess is that many of them are lawyers who haven’t a clue how to get oil out of the seabed but are past masters at getting money out of a large corporate like BP. Tony Hayward is clearly too battle scarred to put up a fight but maybe Bob Dudley, the MD of BP for the Americas and Asia (and a US citizen) could forget the niceties and tell the lawmakers some of the facts of life about the oil industry. Since the BP brand has already taken a beating he has little to lose by standing up to congress.