On "business-friendliness"
Of course, all variety of Louisiana politicians are correct to oppose any and all legal moves to increase the liability of oil producers for cleanup costs related to their rig explosions. After all, if you tax and regulate these people too hard, they will just pack up their drilling rigs, pipelines and all, and move their oil exploration and production businesses to Bangalore, where taxes are lower, wages are cheaper, and mineral extraction rights hardly cost anything at all.
(I am not sure I've actually seen anyone make this argument in exactly so many words, but during the Liverpool dockers' strike, I definitely recall hearing one of the managers trying to claim that Liverpool had to maintain its competitiveness or it would lose market share to places like Hamburg).
On the one hand, haha. On the other hand, it's nice to see the US government not screwing our pension funds (which are, what, 5% invested in BP if they're FTSE trackers?). Anyone British opposed to the current response to the disaster-in-question is fundamentally unpatriotic.
ReplyDeleteOn my third, Scouse, hand, as far as I can make out, a sizeable amount of "really serious boats going to Europe" that would've gone to Port of Liverpool or Port of London before containerisation now dock at Europort Rotterdam, and trans-ship to the UK.
Meanwhile, the majority of the boats that go directly to the UK offload at Felixstowe, which is Europe's second-largest container port. I'm sure the stroppiness of the unions in Liverpool about containers (see: print unions, offset litho [*]) has absolutely nothing to do with that.
[*] the miners' strike is not comparable: coal is actually useful, and digging it in mines is not a bad way of achieving it. The printers' strike and the dockers' strike were rare occasions when Madame T was actually correct: printing newspapers by Linotype and unloading goods by hoist is actually insane, unless the year is 1950. The Port Of New York & New Jersey is still a massive and unionised port, because the unions there were run by people who - although as belligerent and stroppy as a stereotypical US union boss - realised that containers were the only way to do things...
Fuck that, I'm in my 30s. A low FTSE suits me just fine.
ReplyDeleteAlso surely - I've read at least 50 blogs posts in the last 5 years saying this more generally saying this - our reliance on BP is not best measured by pension funds etc but by its annual profits as a proportion of GDP - value added - which at about £9bn in 2009 is about 0.6%. Given a proportion of this must be oil that could be extracted by other firms with little reduction in efficiency then its economy-wide impact is surely rather less?
ReplyDelete1. The Liverpool dock strike was not about containerisation (which incidentally had been accepted long before in took place).
ReplyDelete2. Margaret Thatcher was retired long before it took place.
Sorry, getting my dockers' strikes confused and letting my London perspective cloud my view of dockers' unions' impact on UK port development.
ReplyDeleteYes, someone in the mid-1990s making the point that Dan lists is insane - everything that could economically have been moved to Rotterdam by then already had been.
When there were proposals to mine coal under the Vale of Belvoir, the then Duke of Rutland asked "Can't they build it some were less picturesque, like Wales?"
ReplyDeleteMatthew, if the oil is extracted by Exxon instead, the share of it going to fund British pensioners and their offspring really will be lower.
Interesting, because this is precisely the argument being put very loudly by the miners here in Australia in opposing the new resources rent tax.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's bullshit for the same reason. We've got the minerals[1] just as the Louisianians have got the oil - they aint going anywhere else. That's why it's a RENT (in the economic) tax.
[1]cockney rhyming slang pun intended. Our inflicting Neighbours on you was just retaliation for you inflicting Eastenders on us, so we know about these things.