Page 9

Contents Page    Previous page 8   Next page 10 Cooking the books1

William
Wilberforce
was no saint

If you believe all the eulogies to him recently for pushing through the Act of Parliament 200 years ago banning slave trading in the British Empire you might be surprised that he’s not called Saint William. But for that he’d have to have been a Catholic whereas he was an evangelical Christian of the Anglican persuasion. He was a founder of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion” which specialised in prosecuting people for enjoying themselves on the Sabbath. He supported “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” as the natural order of things and preached to the poor that:

“their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest”.

In other words, pie in the sky when you die. And
“Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin, and naturally depraved. Christianity recognizes no innocence or goodness of heart” (both quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class).

A nasty piece of work, then. But there’s worse. He was a King-and-Country Tory who encouraged mobs to burn effigies of Tom Paine and other “Jacobins”, i.e., sympathisers with the democratic pretensions of the French Revolution. He was also instrumental in the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were later sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

A. L. Morton says of him in A People’s History of England:

“When the industrial discontent was crossed with political Jacobinism the ruling class was terrified into more drastic action, and the result was the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. These laws were the work of Pitt and his sanctimonious friend Wilberforce, whose well known sympathy for the negro slave never prevented him from being the foremost apologist and champion of every act of tyranny in England, from the employment of Oliver the Spy or illegal detention of poor prisoners in Cold Bath Fields gaol to the Peterloo massacre and the suspension of habeas corpus”.

Yes, he was opposed to chattel slavery. From a capitalist point of view, this was an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation. They wanted the only form of slavery to be wage slavery. To which Wilberforce had no objection whatsoever.

(from the Socialist Party’s blogsite at socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/)

 Underlying cause

  On 23 March 2005 an explosion and fire occurred at the BP-owned oil refinery in Texas City. Fifteen workers were killed and 170 injured. The US Chemical and Safety Hazard Investigation Board decided that, on this occasion, it would investigate not just the technical causes of the explosion – which valve was left open, who left it open, which alarm wasn’t working, and the like – but also “the underlying and significant cultural, human factors and organizational causes of the disaster that have a greater impact”.

The result was a report two years later which the Times (21 March) headlined “Watchdog points finger at cost cuts in damning verdict on BP. Budget pressures behind refinery fire. Top management knew of problems”.

BP had acquired the refinery when it took over Amoco in 1998. Following this, BP’s chief executive, Sir John Browne, set a target for all its plants of reducing fixed costs in the year 1999-2000 by 25 percent. These are costs other than labour and materials and consist mainly of buildings and equipment including the costs of maintaining them. “In 2002”, the report discovered, “BP engineers proposed connecting the Isom blowdown drum system to a flare but BP chose a less expensive option”. The refinery manager “ruled against the investment and stated in an e-mail: ‘Bank the savings in 99.999 per cent of the cases’”.

The Chemical Safety Board’s report concluded: “Cost-cutting and budget pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City”.

To go beyond the technical reasons for the explosion and investigate other factors was a step in the right direction. But not far enough. The Board only looked for “the underlying and significant cultural, human factors and organizational causes” within BP. But why stop there? Why not ask what pressures BP’s top executives were under to behave in the way they did?

If the Board had done this, they would have to have taken into account the declaration issued on the occasion of the BP take-over of Amoco in 1998:

“The managements of BP and Amoco already have a shared financial philosophy. The targets our companies have previously set are very similar – powerful annual earnings growth, a strongly-competitive return on capital, and dividends in line with underlying earnings” (see http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex84248.htm).

And also that, at the time, the price of oil was low, meaning that the main way to keep up profits would be by cutting costs rather than increasing sales. And that in fact it was to face what Sir John called in the same statement the “fierce” competition on the energy market that was behind the take-over. And, further, that takeovers involve an expenditure of money which has to be raised one way or another. And that raising this added further pressure to save money and – “in 99.999 per cent of the cases” – bank it.

The cost-cutting exercise was successful – in the middle of it Sir John was elevated to be Lord Browne of Madingley for services to industry – as recorded by the Times financial columnist Carl Mortished:

“In 2000 BP boasted that it had generated $2 billion in cost-savings, and then, in 2001, Lord Browne of Madingley announced a further $2 billion in ‘performance improvements’. By the end of 2002 a further billion dollars was pulled out of the hat and the BP chief executive announced a programme of $2 billion stock repurchases. The cashflows were being delivered in places such as Texas City”.

^ Top ^

Contents Page    Previous page 8   Next page 10