BP protesters stage mock oil spill on steps of London's Tate Britain

No, the photo above isn't a scene from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a shot taken Monday at London's Tate Britain, where protesters have staged a mock oil spill to protest the gallery's acceptance of BP sponsorship.

According to reports from BBC News, a group called the Good Crude Britannia is demanding that the gallery cut its ties with the company over the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf. The group used a substance resembling oil to stage the mock spill, then covered the scene with bird-like feathers. (One report identified the thick black substance as molasses.)

BP has numerous ties with cultural institutions in the U.K. A recent article in the Guardian stated that the oil company has partnerships with the British Museum, the Tate galleries, the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the Almeida Theatre, the National Maritime Museum and the Science and Natural History Museums.

On Monday, the Guardian published a letter signed by numerous artists and cultural figures protesting BP's involvement with the Tate Britain. "These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations," stated the letter.

Here are more images from the mock oil spill at the Tate Britain...

 

-- David Ng

Photos: A group called the Good Crude Britannia stages a mock oil spill at London's Tate Britain. Credit: Carl Court / AFP/Getty Images and Dominic Lipinski / Associated Press

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Comments

[This is a great protest!]

This is a great protest!!!

BP is a nasty multi-national corporation with a horrible safety record (the worst in the industry).

These protesters are right to want to divorce BP from London Arts and Cultural events...

Frank, USA

[Hgus]

I'm relieved to see that the tide is turning. Several weeks ago, it seemed that many in the UK were thinking that people in the US were becoming "Anti-British".

It seems that Hayworths testimony, BPs dishonesty about the volume of the spill, BPs 700+ "willfull and egrigious" violations of safety regulations, their tactics to prevent media from seeing the devastation, etc. are demonstrating that this is not about the British, it is about a poorly run company which has possibly committed many crimes.

BPs "disaster recovery plan for the gulf mexico" after all states that they could handle a blow out of 250k barrels per day and details how they plan to protect walrus in the gulf. Which would be a good plan if Walrus were ever present in the gulf. (To be fair BP is not the only company with a Gulf Walrus protection plan).

People need to realize, that this is what you get when you want "a business friendly" government. Industry (be it oil or financial services) does not and will not police themselves. They will take risks with our environment, our money, our lives and our future for their profit. To do this they support the best politicians a company can BUY.

The scariest part to me isn't this oil spil. It is the fact that after the financial services collapse and this oil disaster, we just gave corporations the "Right" to give unlimited money for politcal campaigns.

Shame on us!

[cbean]

Great protest !
We need to end all ocean drilling. This is an abomination.
This is how empires fail.
The Gulf of Mexico is dying.
How can that be acceptable ?
The cost is too high. Immoral, unethical, and just plain wrong.
The life there is being tortured, whales, dolphins, turtles, plankton.....
We are not separate from our environment.

[Alex]

This misses so many points. Nobody would claim that this oil spill is anything other than tragic on every level but refusing to take money from tobacco companies hasn't stopped people smoking has it? How is this going to stop people using oil based products - we've allowed it to become integral to our lives?

Anyone who owns a car, uses buses or trains, takes a flight, rides a bike, has air conditioning or heating, uses a tumble dryer, buys pantyhose..... it's all linked to the oil industry to the point where the protesters are wearing plastic gloves and a plastic watch! The UK government is making 25% cuts which would affect this gallery & I don't see the protesters offering alternative funding.

Thinking that refusing to take such a relatively small amount of money (in the scale of large company profits) from BP or any energy company isn't going to change the global dependency on cheap oil (they don't drill it to hide under their desks) is naive at best. Changing our behaviour on a global level to decimate our dependence on oil is the best way to prevent these tragedies happening in future - because if people don't want it then there is no business opportunity to drill for it.

[grandma crankypants]

This is ART!
And I love it.

[jeff]

"that this is what you get when you want "a business friendly" government. "

No, this is what you get when you have an inept government that doesn't perform any of the safety checks it was supposed to perform. This is what you get when the government fails to enforce even one of the hundreds of regulations already on the books. This is what you get when environmentalists force you to get resources from the hardest places to get them while preventing you from getting resources that are more readily available.

This administration is one of the least business friendly governments ever and our economy and employment situation show that in plain view. It's funny how the liberal masters have their ignorant lemmings spouting off about the evils of business. How embarrassing it must be to have to defend liberal agendas.

[M]

Less government = financial meltdown, global environmental disasters, massive corruption on every level.

[Bob Dobolino]

Oh, how quickly we forget, Jeff! All these meltdowns (environmental, financial, social, etc.) are the direct result of G. W. Bush's reign at the top. His Administration wrecked the very structure of this country, then sat on their hands until the Obama Administration took over, leaving them to fix the mess. I'm tired of people blaming Obama for problems he's actually trying to solve. He wasn't the one who stripped the regulators of their power to oversee industry (including Big Oil), he wasn't the one who decided to cut corners to maximize profits which led to this spill, and he wasn't the one was in bed with the people leading this country towards self-destruction. And don't even get me started on Ron Paul, who's response would be to stand back and let the local governments fend for themselves. You can't have your cake and eat it too: either you have Government involvement (it doesn't have to be "Big" Government, effective would be enough), or you don't, but you can't have it both ways. Government helps builds those freeways you drive on, it supports the troops financially, it provides cash infusions to boost the economy and save your 401(k). I'm tired of the hypocrisy. Oh, yeah, to the point, great protest. It even ended up in the LA Times, half a world away.

[J. C. Wolf]

This is not a protest. This is a bunch of destructive people who are mean spirited without a thought to anyone but themselves and their games. If they really wanted a protest they could have organized FAKE ART OPENINGS on the steps of all art galleries and museums with huge paintings and photos of the birds and wildlife affected by the BP OIL SPILL.
They have accomplished nothing accept to show what idiots they are and of course THEY COVERED THEIR FACES .....one does that when one is not proud of what they are doing.

[Jack C NYC]

BP's Other Gifts to America - and to the World
Monday 21 June 2010
by: Lawrence S. Wittner | History News Network

The offshore oil drilling catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico brought to us by BP has overshadowed its central role over the past century in fostering some other disastrous events.

BP originated in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—a British corporation whose name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company two decades later. With exclusive rights to extract, refine, export, and sell Iran's rich oil resources, the company reaped enormous profits. Meanwhile, it shared only a tiny fraction of the proceeds with the Iranian government. Similarly, although the company's British personnel lived in great luxury, its Iranian laborers endured lives of squalor and privation.

In 1947, as Iranian resentment grew at the giant oil company's practices, the Iranian parliament called upon the Shah, Iran's feudal potentate, to renegotiate the agreement with Anglo-Iranian. Four years later, Mohammed Mossadeq, riding a tide of nationalism, became the nation's prime minister. As an enthusiastic advocate of taking control of Iran's oil resources and using the profits from them to develop his deeply impoverished nation, Mossadeq signed legislation, passed unanimously by the country's parliament, to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The British government was horrified. Eager to assist the embattled corporation, it imposed an economic embargo on Iran and required its technicians to leave the country, thus effectively blocking the Iranian government from exporting its oil. When this failed to bring the Iranians to heel, the British government sought to arrange for the overthrow of Mossadeq—first through its own efforts and, later (when Britain's diplomatic mission was expelled from Iran for its subversive activities), through the efforts of the U.S. government. But President Truman refused to commit the CIA to this venture.

To the delight of Anglo-Iranian, it received a much friendlier reception from the new Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had worked much of his life as a lawyer for multinational corporations, and viewed the Iranian challenge to corporate holdings as a very dangerous example to the world. Consequently, the CIA was placed in charge of an operation, including fomenting riots and other destabilizing activities, to overthrow Mossadeq and advance oil company interests in Iran.

Organized by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt in the summer of 1953, the coup was quite successful. Mossadeq was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, the power of the pro-Western shah was dramatically enhanced, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was once again granted access to Iran's vast oil resources. To be sure, thanks to the key role played in the coup by the U.S. government, the British oil company—renamed British Petroleum—henceforth had to share the lucrative oil extraction business in Iran with U.S. corporations. Even so, in the following decades, with the Iranian public kept in line by the Shah's dictatorship and by his dreaded secret police, the SAVAK, it was a very profitable arrangement—although not for most Iranians.

But, of course, actions can have unforeseen consequences. In Iran, public anger grew at the Shah's increasingly autocratic rule, culminating in the 1979 revolution and the establishment of a regime led by Islamic fanatics. Not surprisingly, the new rulers—and much of the population—blamed the United States for the coup against Mossadeq and its coziness with the Shah. This, in turn, led to the ensuing hostage crisis and to the onset of a very hostile relationship between the Iranian and U.S. governments.

And there was worse to come. Terrified by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on their southern border, Soviet leaders became obsessed with fundamentalist revolt in Afghanistan and began pouring troops into that strife-torn land. This was the signal for the U.S. government to back an anti-Soviet, fundamentalist jihad in Afghanistan, thus facilitating the growth of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, who eventually turned their weapons on the United States.

Furthermore, as part of its anti-Iran strategy, the U.S. government grew increasingly chummy with Iran's arch foe, Iraq. As Saddam Hussein seemed a particularly useful ally, Washington provided him with military intelligence and the helicopters that he used to spray poison gas on Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq War. Might not such a friendship, cemented with a handshake by Donald Rumsfeld, have emboldened Saddam Hussein to act more freely in the region in subsequent years? It certainly didn't improve U.S. relations with Iran, which today is headed by a deplorable government that—consumed by fear and loathing of the United States—might be developing nuclear weapons.

At this point, we might well wonder if it was such a good idea to overthrow a democratic, secular nationalist like Mossadeq to preserve the profits of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now renamed BP). Indeed, given the sordid record of BP and other giant oil companies, we might wonder why we tolerate them at all.

Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

[Gail Acres]

I love the protest! I wish the oil spill in the Gulf was mollases too! There is NO OIL here in Southwest Florida, they say we may not ever see any oil...I hope it's true.. Let's get this spill stopped and clean it up!!