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British criticize Obama's BP rhetoric
A British Petroleum sign is seen at a gas station in Manassas, Va.
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Kai Ryssdal: We'll get to more of BP and the U.K. in just a second, but there's one other thing the president said today that caught our ears.
President Barack Obama: BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all of our interests that it remain so.
So one would believe the official U.S. position, then, is that it's best BP not go bankrupt. The president's tough talk about BP the past couple of weeks is playing quite a bit differently in the U.K. "Anti-British" is the phrase that's being used.
From London, Marketplace's Stephen Beard reports.
Stephen Beard: First, there was the president's pointed and repeated references to "British Petroleum."
Jason Kenney: BP has not been called British Petroleum since 1998.
Jason Kenney of the Dutch bank ING says the president might not have given the company quite such a pummeling if it had been homegrown.
Kenney: To be honest, I think if this was an American company that had, unfortunately, been exposed to this catastrophe, you know, things might have gone slightly differently.
Analysts here say that Obama's tongue-lashing worsened the fall in BP shares. And that's hit many British pension funds with substantial holdings in the company.
Fraser Nelson edits the conservative magazine The Spectator. He says Anglo-American relations have been damaged.
Fraser Nelson: It has left the impression that Barack Obama doesn't value Britain as an ally that much, and was quite prepared to use anti-British rhetoric where it played well to a certain segment of his home audience.
But another leading British commentator takes a different view. Imagine, he says, that Exxon-Mobil had spent weeks dumping 30,000 barrels of oil a day along the British coast. Might there not be there not be just a little anti-American feeling here?
In London, this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.
Ryssdal: BP shareholders on this side of the pond -- Americans hold about 39 percent of the company -- got a teeny bit of their money back today.
A futher thought on the rhetoric aimed at Britain:
Suppose that the BP oil leak had been in the English Channel. The coast of France from Calais to Normandy would be under oil.
By comparison with what Mr. Sarcoze of France would say, I believe President Obama's language is positively complimentary...
Actually, I think the British who are complaining are missing the point. The reason he repeatedly referred to it as "British Petroleum" is to emphasize to Americans that the company is British, thus not subject to a takeover by the US Government, as some ignoramuses have been urging (as if the US Govt knows how to run an oil company, or any company, better than those who do it every day!) It's really silly to say he would not have been as hard on BP if they were an American company - what about all of the big Wall Street banks, they are American & he certainly has not been soft on them either.
