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If I go inside a church again, it will be feet first, screwed down under uncompromising oak. Even then, I implore all keeners and beaters of breasts to get hold of an electro‐cardiograph machine and carry out one last test: the experience could well bring on a protesting surge and revive me — apoplexy in reverse, as it were.

If ever you need to define the precise difference between primary and secondary school aims in Britain and put your explanation in a nut‐shell, this will do as well as anything. Disarming, slightly disdainful, more than a little prompted by the defence mechanisms of teachers without degrees, it runs like this: ‘In the secondary school they teach subjects: in the primary school we teach children’.

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

Accles & Pollock Ltd. of Oldbury, Worcestershire, a TI Steel Tube Division company, will be exhibiting a comprehensive range of precision steel tube and tubular products, including plain, annularly convoluted and thin wall tube, at Farnborough.