Daily Sport and Sunday Sport - The World's most outrageous paper

Yank oil's a messy business

Monday, June 21, 2010 by Daily Sport .

TWO thumbs way up to BP, it really knows how to get up the Yanks’ noses. After coating the coastline of America’s southern states with crude its beleaguered boss Tony Hayward decided to take his yacht out into the clear blue waters round the Isle of Wight just to rub it in. As ill-considered moves go it was up there with Gordon Brown’s YouTube gurning. Now BP’s teamed up with an Iranian company for a job in the North Sea and the US has gone apeshit, steaming in with sanctions and saying the angry peoples of the desert are “persons we should not do business with”. That’s because our chums across the Pond want it all ways. They need oil because their fuel-hungry nation soaks it up by the oceanload hauling their fat arses around in Humvees. They’re happy for backward Arabs to dig it up and flog it to them cheaply, so long as the politicians in those benighted lands don’t interfere. The longterm plan is: use up all their oil then give them the finger and leave the place an ineffectual wasteland when it’s gone. So when leaders like Ahmadinnerjacket in Iran, a country ruled by gentlemen who take their faith more seriously than most, start nuclear programmes to keep their country going when the black gold runs out, Uncle Sam gets shirty. True, the world would feel a lot more comfortable were nuclear dabblings in the hands of a more stable and reliable race, the Swedes perhaps. But you can’t stop progress and whether we like it or not Iranians have every right to move forward from the 8th century, even if they’d be happy to see us bombed back to it. BP has a long history of working in these countries, finding its way round local difficulties, accepting and working within and around rules set by nations with an altogether different view of life from the West’s. Despite its vast and expensive current problems I reckon it has a better chance of a long-term future than, say, US foreign policy, which doesn’t seem to amount to much beyond the extremely prejudicial use of guns and lawyers. For the Yanks I see things only getting messier, in just about every way.

Royal palaces need a sheik up

IT seems to me that some of us are just not thinking straight. A survey has found out that a majority of Brits believe we should sell off royal premises to reduce the national debt. Buckingham Palace itself could be knocked out for £1.5bn alone, experts suggest. Great, so you kick our royal family out and get Saudi royals in, them being the only ones able to afford that sort of cash for a foreign property. I assume Trooping of the Colour will give way to public beheadings. Should still draw the crowds, mind, and it could solve the prisons problem at a stroke. Hang on, I see where you’re going now. I’ve not been thinking straight.

IT’S the emergency budget this week. Expect the following: Booze and fags up, taxes up. Lots of waffle, nothing much changing. They’ll call it radical but it won’t be. Politicians don’t have the imagination or guts for that. Radical goes something like this: Give everyone of working age £50 a week whether they’re working or not. Abolish all other benefits. The maths is (sort of) straightforward.We currently hand out around £100,000,000,000 in benefits each year. There are 60million people living in Britain. Some 36milion are of working age, that's between 16 and 65. So take that money in share it back out through one organisation. It works out about £50 each. That’s £50 if you work, £50 if you're out of work or simply can’t be arsed. Sounds immoral on the face of it, but it’s not really. Regional grants from the massive bureaucracy savings should ensure enough jobs. Pensioners and kids aren’t affected. No one will starve to death, workers won’t be resentful, dependency culture will end, and an incentivised country will start finding its way in the world again with everyone taking part and having a share. There might be other even more radical ideas out there. Whatever. You won’t be seeing them.

AFTER all the speculation about what speech Fabio Capello should play to the England team before matches he’s surely down to just the two. Churchill’s talk to his old school after the Battle of Britain had been won exhorted kids to “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never.” That really ought to do the trick. If not, Churchill’s lesser known“You can kiss goodbye to several million quids worth of sponsorship, get spat at in the streets, your Bentley’s tyres slashed and the girls not even looking at you, never mind join in a roasting session” might spur the lads to victory.

THE fan who burst into the England dressing room at the World Cup says he was looking for a toilet. He found it.

FOR England fans it’s very difficult to find a way out of the gloom and depression after two desperate displays. If you’re one of them and you’re teetering on the suicidal brink, remember France and how they’re doing. Ha, Ha,ha, Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha, etc. See, I knew you‘d feel better.

WE all gathered round the telly with our TV dinners on Saturday night to watch the old family friendly classic My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I remarked to the missus they should make a film about me and her, calling it My Big Fat Spanish Wife. The evening could have gone better.

ROLLING Stone magazine’s top 500 all-time greatest songs has come out and, with the predictability of the sh*ts following a bad beer, John Lennon’s Imagine is right up there at number three. I’ve never understood why this ditty is so revered. It’s a bit of unreal, simplistic cobblers written by a drugged-up, tax dodging, whining hypocrite with an inexhaustible capacity for self-pity. Don’t get me wrong, Lennon could knock out great songs, it’s just that this is one he could have written when he was five. It sounds like a five-year-old wrote it. “Imagine there’s no Heaven, possessions, religion.” As a philosophy it’s ironically similar to Genghis Khan’s dream for humanity and his nomadic people as he set about raping and murdering the known world of his time. Perhaps that was what the sainted John had in mind when he wrote it, a sort of hymn to anarchy, but the drugs and Yoko’s screeching voice messed his head up and it came out all wrong. And now it’s a cult, largely thanks to its author’s early demise. Imagine there’s no Imagine? It’s easy if you try.

LENNON’S A Day In The Life, for example, now that was more like it. A landmark in musical history. Not sure I would have paid £800,000 for the scrap of paper he wrote the lyrics on, though, like some tw*t of a collector did last week. You could start looking at Shakespeare First Folios for that money. You’d have to ask yourself, “Will everyone still be singing A Day In The Life 400 years from now?”. To buy or not to buy, that’d be the question.

LATEST warning from the Health and Safety Gestapo, you’d better pay attention. Those barbecues: a typical meal could contain double the recommended daily maximum of salt. Terrifying, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s not. Surely the 10 pints of beer you’ve drunk will dilute it all? They’d better go back to their labs and check it out while we carry on having a good time.