The slick of corporate hatred appears to be spreading even further than the slick that is ruining the Gulf coast, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

LAST WEEK, I was making polite conversation with a neighbour when, apropos of nothing much, she said: “I really do hate BP.”

This woman is British, middle aged, middle class and, as far as I know, has no firm views on anything apart, perhaps, from whether her son’s physics teacher is up to scratch.

But she, like lots of perfectly normal people, seems to have got herself covered by the slick of corporate hatred that is spreading even further and more uncontrollably than the slick of oil.

It’s not just Americans or lefties or environmentalists who now hate British Petroleum. Everyone else seems to as well.

Compare this to how we responded to the biggest corporate catastrophe of all time, the gas leak at Bhopal in which thousands of people died.

We were horrified. We wanted lessons to be learnt and compensation to be paid. But I don’t remember us all hating Union Carbide with quite the same vindictive intensity with which we now hate BP.

If you type “I hate Union Carbide” into Google you get five matches. Do the same with BP and you get 37,400.

You could say this was because Bhopal happened 25 years ago on the other side of the world and Union Carbide doesn’t sell products that slosh about in the tank of your car.

But I think there’s something else going on too: hating companies and the people who lead them has become a new global pastime.

When I was a teenager, hating companies was a much milder affair. This wasn’t because we felt more warmly towards business back then: on the contrary, in Britain the educated classes regarded all commerce with snobbish disdain.

In particular, we despised advertising because we thought it was brainwashing. We also hated tobacco companies because their shareholders were making a killing selling things that killed their customers.

We didn’t care for bankers because they were parasites and usurers. And we didn’t like oil companies because of the sneaky way that they always pushed up petrol prices when crude prices went up and then seemed to push them up again when crude prices went down.

Beyond that, there were a few individual companies that we singled out for special hatred. We hated Barclays and Shell because they did business in South Africa.

Later, we hated Nike and Gap for not doing the right thing by their sweatshop workers. But we didn’t hate them very hard or very consistently; it was a fragmented and feeble effort when set against the universal, concerted loathing that has been inspired by BP.

Where does all this hatred come from? Business doesn’t seem to be much more hateful or management more incompetent than it was 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

In fact, business mainly is more decent and managers less amateurish and hopeless than they used to be.

Instead, I can think of four other things that have changed in the past few years that explain why nice women such as my neighbour are striking out on a crusade of anti-corporate hatred.

The first is the emotional hangover of the credit crunch. Our hatred of bankers was wild and uncontrolled and we had never felt anything like it before towards men in suits.

Dick Fuld and Fred Goodwin inspired hatred on a scale normally only achieved by an Idi Amin or Osama bin Laden. So much hating has got us into the hating habit.

The second cause is executive pay. We already resent how much top people pay themselves, so when people who earn too much show that they are not only incompetent but also insensitive and tactless, our resentment spills over into hatred.

The third reason is more subtle, and stems from the great personification of business. In the past decade or so, companies have put a great deal of effort into creating an image for themselves supported by a whole load of values.

The more successful they are in creating such a personality, the more there is to love – and hate.

The most successful companies in the US, Microsoft and Walmart, are loved and hated in equal measure.

And finally, there is the internet, with its power to turn personal emotion into a global epidemic overnight.

Hating companies is now fun, easy and varied. There are so many different ways of doing it. You can hate BP on Twitter, Facebook and, most rewardingly of all, on YouTube.

If you haven’t already watched the BP Spills Coffee video, in which a group of executives panic when a Styrofoam cup is overturned during a meeting, do so right now. It will make you laugh – and make you hate BP a bit more than you did already. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010