Blaming oil companies is wrong

Extended version of a piece appearing in The Express, 2001

'Blame the oil companies” screamed the banner headline in the London Evening Standard. The director the Petrol Retailers’ Association was bemused why the companies had not sent their drivers and tankers out to the garage forecourts, especially since the demonstrations were peaceful. Someone from the Centre for Global Energy Studies joined assorted newsmen in accusing the oil companies of enjoying the protests. Others went further and accused them of complicity. This is all almost certainly rot.

Yes, it always pays to wonder if firms are behaving in a Machiavellian way. They are of course self-interested. Maybe the big guns of Big Oil have been conference calling each other as to how to play the issue. Maybe the high prices they are being charged for crude make it worth their while to plot to see if the price at the pumps could be eased, but with someone else (the Treasury) taking the strain. Another theory has it that the high value of their own reserves, and the strength of their own share prices, means that they don’t mind strangling the country’s juice for a few days. They just got richer.

There's another and much simpler reason why the firms were reluctant on Monday and Tuesday to send tankers out of their terminals. Remember Brent Spar? Shell suffered a media outcry five years ago when it started to tow a vast storage buoy out to be sunk in the Atlantic, as had been agreed with the Government’s regulators. The furore produced an agonised re-assessment of how to keep on the right side of 'the public”. For years big firms had been told that they were hopelessly out of touch and arrogant. Now they believed it. Still the message is being received loud and clear. The media, politicians of left and right, and consumer groups all bellow it. The Green hardly ever say anything else.

So how on earth does an industry respond when there are nice farmers and salt of the earth small hauliers camped outside their gates? Extensive and expensive PR consultancy (much of it from ex-Greens, lefties, right-on journalists and consumer activitists) have taught boards of directors that you never, ever put yourself against public opinion, at least not in public. Savvy to the modern, touchie-feelie, world, the firms waited until the people who are supposed to run the country – the Government – told them loud and clear that they really ought to supply their customers. The firms needed this belated political support as much as the promised police protection.

Finally, Gordon Brown reminded the world, this isn't the British Way, not even with New Labour. Poor John Prescott was sound too: let's remember that democracy has proper channels, he said. The TUC conference yesterday agreed. How boring. How true. The oil companies were right to wait for the forces of real democracy to swing behind them.