British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has very rarely been viewed as a friend of the oil and gas industry, but his lack of popularity took a new low last week.
It started when Brown called for an international oil summit to be held in London this coming December, but failed to invite the leaders of several members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
OPEC Sec. Gen. Abdalla el-Badri drew attention to the slight on Oct. 28, saying that some of the group’s ministers had not received invitations from Brown to the proposed meeting.
As a result of the oversight, el-Badri said the group would boycott Brown’s conference unless invitations were extended to all the heads of state of individual OPEC countries. Brown’s people quickly backtracked.
‘Ignore my U-turn’
The UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change confirmed that Brown’s summit idea had been dropped and that a ministerial-level meeting would be held instead.
Brown’s office said, “Given the fact that there will be a world leaders’ meeting anyway on Nov. 15 to discuss the international economic situation and no doubt oil will be discussed as part of that, we decided to revert to the form of approach taken at the Jeddah meeting, which was that this should be a meeting primarily of energy ministers.”
Brown did not limit his unpopularity with the oil and gas industry to members of OPEC. In fact, he decided to take on international oil companies as a whole, saying that energy firms should make reductions in gasoline and home fuel bills to reflect the currently falling price of oil.
Brown said, “There has been more than a halving in the price of oil and, just as when the price goes up people see it immediately reflected in the petrol pump prices, we want to see the falling price reflected in the petrol pump prices, and we are determined to see that happens.”
City Spy weighs in
He could probably do that very easily by following some advice from the City Spy column in London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
“Gordon Brown is banging on again about high petrol prices and oil companies making too much money,” City Spy wrote on Oct 29. “At the moment it’s BP, next it will be Shell.”
But who is really making the killing at the pumps?
“Yes,” said City Spy, “you guessed it, the PM and his Chancellor Alistair Darling, who take two-thirds in fuel duty and Value Added Tax.”
“That’s right, a whopping two-thirds–more than 66 pence with petrol at £1/l. If Flash Gordon really wanted to help struggling families and businesses through the economic downturn, how about starting here.”
City Spy was not the only one to notice Brown’s cant.
“He just wants to blame somebody and he is blaming OPEC,” said al-Badri, who dismissed Brown’s criticism of the group’s decision to cut oil production as “hypocritical.”
