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No Oil For Ken
When a rich country takes oil from a much poorer country at well below the market rate, commentators are quick to attack the colonialist plunder of developing world natural resources. The usual suspects were strangely quiet, however, when London's Mayor Ken Livingstone arranged a deal to buy cheap oil from Venezuela's tough guy leader Hugo Chavez.
Following Chavez's visit to the UK in May, Ken took up the president's offer to buy oil at a cheap rate in order to supply London's poor. Chavez has offered similar deals to poor regions of other rich nations, including the US, as a means of cocking a snook at leaders he opposes. More often, some of Venezuela's oil is used by the president to buy political support overseas or to prop up regimes he finds congenial.
Fine: Venezuela voted for Chavez knowing he intended to use oil as a political tool. It's the world's fifth largest exporter of oil, so it has no shortage of the stuff. Other nations use aid and even military assistance to buy support overseas, why can't Venezuela use what it has?
After all, giving Ken a chance to out-smug Blair and warm the cockles of Britain's hard-left nostalgics isn't the same as using oil cash to export terrorism (as Iran does) or build radical mosques overseas (as Saudi Arabia has done).
But, as the Times reports, offering one of the world's richest cities cheap oil while no fewer that 38 percent of Venezuela's people remain below the UN poverty line has caused ripples of dissent in the country. And that's developing world, soil-eating poverty, not the simply poor-by-western-standards guys that Ken hoped to cheer this winter.
The main opposition candidate in Venezuela's forthcoming elections Manuel Rosales described the deal as "political corruption."
“I ask the (London) mayor not to commit that injustice to Venezuela", he said, "because he is taking a part of our wealth and doing grave harm to the country.
“It is not just the person that commits the crime, but the accomplice ends up becoming a part of the crime (...)
"For me, it’s a crime that there is hunger, unemployment, poor services, hospitals that don’t work, roads that are a disaster — and the Government is giving away our wealth...“Both the person giving it away and the person receiving it are sinning. Ethically, [Livingstone] should not accept it. In the name of Venezuela, we would ask him not to ruin the country any more.
“If London needed [the cheap oil], that would be one thing. But we’re talking about London here."
Mysteriously, Ken's visit to Caracas, where he hoped to sign the deal, was cancelled at the last minute yesterday. Venezuela's embassay says the deal will go ahead, but will be signed in London. Better do it soon - winter, and that election, is beginning to bite.
