British bashing? Quit whining. It is not your coast.

BP is a multinational oil company, but some politicians and media in the US sometimes mistakenly call it British Petroleum. In reality it includes both Amoco and Arco, former US oil companies merged into it.

But bashing BP is not based on Britain or anything British or English. It is about BP’s continual minimisation of the scope of the disaster. First it was announced as less than a thousand barrels of oil gushing per day. Then a thousand, then two thousand, then five thousandf, then ten thousand, then nineteen thousand, then forty thousand, and now up to sixty thousand barrels per day. They were wholely unprepared for any spill and then acted like it was fairly routine.

Britons depend on BP’s lucrative dividend for pension finds. But that does not weigh much on the scope of this disaster. If a US company, like ExxonMobil or Chevron, had a similarlky sized spill of a million, or two or three, barrels fouling their coast from Scotland down past Dover and over to the Isle of Wight, the British would bw bashers, too.