Nationalism won't wash the oil spill

British tabloids are not traditionally thought of as havens of good sense and diplomacy. Indeed, for papers such as the Daily Mail, the intention appears to be to get as irate as possible on behalf of some mythical middle-Englander (apologies here to anyone who lives in middle England).

Consider, for example, the current brouhaha over the dialogue between US President Obama and UK Prime Minister Cameron around BP and the oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. By all accounts, Obama and Cameron had a reasonable dialogue over the weekend, with the US administration seemingly keen to assure its British counterparts that it was not engaged in an ’anti-British’ conspiracy, despite the rhetorical slippage in using, on occasion, the words ’British Petroleum’.

Unfortunately, the words of the US administration have stoked up Dad’s Army no end.

After Obama demanded that BP deposit money into a ring-fenced emergency fund to compensate US citizens hit by the disaster, a Daily Mail editorial of 14 June 2010 somehow read this as the US administration believing that BP ’could be pushed to bankruptcy by the sheer weight of compensation claims’.

The editorial goes on: ’Significantly, [Obama] has not asked the American companies Transocean, which owns the stricken oil rig, or Halliburton, which carried out the drilling on BP’s behalf, to set up similar accounts. Doesn’t this increase suspicions that for short-term political advantage Mr Obama is quite happy to drive a British-based company to the wall, while ignoring the equivalent guilt of two major US firms?’

But here we have some more rhetorical slippage. What does ’British-based’ mean? Presumably it means that BP can’t seriously be referred to as solely British, otherwise you can bet your bottom… sterling that the Daily Mail would refer to it as such.

And there’s the rub. I freely admit that I haven’t investigated in detail the precise make-up of ’British-based’ BP’s shareholders or those of ’American companies’ such as Transocean or Halliburton but if recent events in the ’world’ economy have demonstrated anything, it’s that finance is international. So, the point is not to set up some shadow ’Yanks versus Brits’ universe but to recognise that if any large company - for example, Lehman Brothers - suffers in the world economy then that affects us all internationally.

We should face up to the fact that the US administration has a legitimate case with BP and not play silly, outdated nationalist games.