Man says "Great Britain is great"

Mr. Dudley of BP personally opposes Scottish independence because "Great Britain is great". He makes himself available for interview by the BBC and claims (without any challenge at all by the interviewer) to be "concerned" that it would create "uncertainties" for the company.

If Alex Massie and the Spectator, neither well-known for pro-independence sympathies, can immediately see this claim for the "silly" "poppycock" that it is then wtf is this story (not reported by any other station's broadcast news at all this evening) doing as the second item on the BBC national news, the lead item on Reporting Scotland and plastered all over the BBC website?


Oil companies make money where the oil is. Let's agree that it would cause some inconvenience for BP to have to have separate operations in Scotland and England. To be regretted, maybe. But hey ho. BP will just have to be put to slight inconvenience. What are they going to do? Move the oil fields? They may not like the thought of a Yes vote and will want to make as much money as they can but that is not an argument for or against our independence.

And even on its own terms, the claimed "uncertainty" doesn't exist. It's a 1/100 on certainty that there will be a currency union (not least precisely because companies like BP will want the UK government to agree to it). Ladbrokes will give 50/1 - 50/1! - on anything else. How much "certainty" can you want? The threat to EU membership comes not from Scottish independence but from the UK's proposed in/out referendum. In the UK BP uses the pound, in Norway the krona, in USA the US dollar, in Australia the Australian dollar, in Brazil the real, in Russia the ruble and in Azerbeijan the manat but oil is always priced in dollars and they seem to cope (HT Dick Winchester). They operate in around 80 countries including Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Mozambique and Mr. Putin's Russia. I'd bet there's more "uncertainty" about almost everything you can imagine in most of those countries than there would be in an independent, democratic, northern European nation but BP seems eager to be allowed to exploit the natural resources of every last one of them. Why not? That's how they make their money.

Surely, if those around 80 became around 81 then any company worth its salt would struggle through and surely the BBC has done us all a disservice by giving this story the credibility it has?