Why we should be proud of these profits

By any standards today's figures from Shell are mindblowing and obscene. No company, surely, has the right to make such a disgusting amount of money?

Shell's freedom to notch up such vast profits is for society to determine. But consider: the bigger the profit, the more the firm pays in tax and the more the shareholders prosper - and they include the major pension funds, so that means you and I benefit.

If we think this is still odious, we should ask ourselves: what do we want in this country from our major businesses? We are very lucky we have in BP and Shell, and in some of the banks as well, world-class institutions.

If the answer is that we want the most successful corporations possible and we want to keep them that way, then the only solution is to leave them well alone - not to hit them with a windfall tax, not to tie them up in yet more burdensome red tape and government intervention.

Amazing as Shell's surplus is, it is not as good as all that. They have only hit the jackpot because of the rising global

oil

price. If the cost of a barrel of crude goes up by a dollar, Shell makes around $400 million a year in extra profit. It's that easy - and it also goes the other way if the price goes down.

This Mount Everest of cash is not coming from you and me putting petrol into our cars because we have to. The oft-repeated joke in the industry is that it's not the Browne of BP (their boss, Lord Browne) who rips us off at the pumps but the other Brown, Gordon the Chancellor. Pre-tax petrol is cheaper in the UK than anywhere else in the EU - the fact is, we pay the highest petrol tax (about 75p in every pound) in the EU.

It's also ironic but true that Shell is a deeply troubled company.

Management is reeling from having told the City it had greater reserves

than it had; the corporate structure, split between the UK and the Netherlands, is unwieldy. Shell has not been finding enough oil and gas.

Lack of the raw product is for the future and is not reflected in these results. The company has done so well because of the oil price (and the gas price is also high), and because its downstream side - refining and retailing - is just so mammoth.

Shell has more petrol stations across the planet than McDonald's has restaurants. Its seashell logo is a better known symbol in some parts of the world than the Christian cross - and no other British business can say that.

Crazy as it might seem, we should be proud of Shell today, not ashamed.