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Budgets and BP on Agenda for Cameron U.S. Visit

20 July 2010 20:12 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The British prime minister, David Cameron, arrived at the White House Tuesday morning for a visit with President Obama that is expected to be dominated by discussions of the economic recovery, BPâ€™S oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and new scrutiny of the companyâ€™s role in lobbying for a prisoner-transfer agreement between Libya and Britain that preceded the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, APA reports quoting The New York Times.
The prime minister called the release of the bomber from a Scottish prison last year â€œprofoundly misguidedâ€ in a radio interview on Tuesday morning but said it was a government decision, not one made by the battered oil giant BP.
Mr. Cameron, who 10 weeks after taking office is making his first visit to the United States as prime minister, also sought to wave away another potentially major source of disagreement: the strikingly different approaches the two men are taking to budget-cutting at a time of a fragile economic recovery.
The fledgling coalition government that Mr. Cameron leads has called for budget reductions of 25 percent by every British government department â€” cuts that, as an NPR interviewer pointed Tuesday morning, some commentators were calling â€œsavage.â€ That approach has also placed the Cameron government at odds with the Obama administration, which fears that deep spending cuts now could knock the underpinnings out from the tentative recovery now under way.
Mr. Cameron told the interviewer that while it was vital for Britain to act to maintain investor confidence, his difference with Mr. Obama was really one of timing.
â€œWeâ€™re not a reserve currency, weâ€™re not the United States of America â€” we canâ€™t take our time with this,â€ Mr. Cameron said.
Of financial measures, he said that the United States and Britain â€œsee it in the same way, which is that every country has to deal with its budget deficit, but the time at which we do it can vary.â€
Mr. Cameron and Mr. Obama have a ledger of other issues to discuss, including the Cameron governmentâ€™s decision to set an end date of 2015 for Britainâ€™s combat role in Afghanistan, and the controversy that has built around BP, Britainâ€™s largest company, since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Asked whether the Afghanistan end date could be achieved, Mr. Cameron replied, â€œI think it is realistic.â€ He said that the training of Afghan security forces, while â€œnot perfect,â€ was on track.
â€œWeâ€™re not in Afghanistan to create the perfect democracy or the perfect society, weâ€™re there for a very simple national security reason,â€ he said: was to prevent Afghanistan from being a training ground for extremists. He said that Afghans should know that the coalition countries will support them for the long term.
Mr. Cameronâ€™s two-day visit will include meetings in New York with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Wall Street executives. But issues involving BP are likely to provide its focal point, and the prime minister and his aides used a series of statements in the days before leaving London to stake out a position intended to limit the damage to BP â€” and to Britain â€” from the oil companyâ€™s troubles, as well as to improve the political climate for the visit.