Bhopal and BP

As the Guardian rightly put it in a recent leader article there is much to ponder about the attitude of the US towards BP.

"What is going on in the Gulf of Mexico today is an example of Newton's third law of motion: for every action by BP there is an equal and opposite reaction by the federal government in Washington. The result is that BP is, rightly, being held to account for cleaning up the biggest oil pollution in US history. But just imagine if the blowout on the drilling rig had caused not 11 but up to 25,000 US deaths; that the compensation Washington finally accepted fell far short of that required even to cover the medical bills of the survivors; that 26 years on , BP had still to clean up the site of the accident which was poisoning the local water supply; and that Britain refused to extradite to a US court the main BP executives responsible. 

"Unthinkable? Well, that is how the US multinational Union Carbide Corporation, now owned by Dow Chemical, has behaved since it created the world's worst industrial disaster at Bhopal in central India. The difference between BP and Union Carbide is not just a matter of the location of the disaster, although it is plainly that too. It is also down to the fact that successive national and state governments in India have rolled over time and time again to the realpolitik of dealing with Dow Chemical's other investments in India."

The devastating piece on the Today programme by an Indian journalist reduced it to a devastatingly simple equation. An 86 year old woman who had lost 16 members of her family in the incident, lost her eyesight and had her own health adversely affected will receive the equivalent of 3 pence compensation after 26 years. 

That is correct - 3 pence! It is not a misprint. 

It is a disgrace.