Fuelling panic

IN less than a week, Britain was brought close to a standstill. Protests at the high cost of motor fuel by haulage companies were quickly supported by a curious mixture of farmers, small business owners and members of the general public. It did not, frankly, lead to disaster, in spite of the excitable reactions of some of the press, and the panic reactions of some people who, for example, rushed to supermarkets to lay in supplies in quantities appropriate to a siege.

It was, however, a situation which had lessons for a number of different groups, including the Government, and which underlined some serious weaknesses in the way in which the country is organised.

It showed that the suppliers of motor fuel, the big multi- national oil companies, have no responsibility for maintaining the supply of what is in the modern world an essential commodity. Why should they have? They are purely commercial organisations. But the product they sell is as essential as electricity, and gas, and water, the supply of which is protected, and the petrol price protests laid bare the impotence of the Government in this important area. The point was emphasised by Professor Ian Fells, leading energy specialist, in a letter to The Times, in which he argued that the Government must develop an energy strategy "which will not leave us vulnerable to overseas oil and gas suppliers, not to say industrial action by our own disaffected workers". The Government has recognised the immediate need by planning legislation which will impose on oil companies the same statutory obligation to maintain supplies as rests on the privatised utilities which supply the other essential commodities.

The nature of the protesters - not the traditional practitioners of industrial action - was another interesting feature of the situation. Equally interesting were some of the reactions to it. Conservative politicians who babbled about revolution and a threat to democracy at the time of the strike by coal miners during the period of Mrs Thatcher's government, and who supported brutally insensitive treatment of those strikers, were now speaking approvingly of protesters trying to force a change of government policy (on fuel tax) by demonstration. William Hague, Conservative leader, called them fine, upstanding citizens.

The Daily Mail, a paper not noted for either consistency or a liking for continental Europe, had lambasted the French Government earlier in the month for "cravenly" caving in to fuel price protesters, but now carried an article praising protest as the lifeblood of democracy. Direct action, one must conclude, is all right if it embarrasses a British Labour Government, even if many of the protesters have no higher motive than a dislike of paying fuel tax.

Another lesson - for politicians, and for the community as a whole - was that Britain is more heavily dependent than its European neighbours on road transport. The reason is simple; successive governments have been heavily influenced by the powerful road lobby and there has been no coherent overall transport policy. (The present government has shown some signs of awareness of this, and of a wish to reverse the situation.)

The most significant lesson to be learnt from the whole affair was a painful one for the Government, namely that they were out of touch with popular feeling. Opinion polls have confirmed this, showing a dramatic fall in their popular support, which is an unhappy message to receive at the beginning of the political party conference season.

It was clearly right for Tony Blair to refuse to let the Government be bullied by protesters into making tax concessions. Allowing policy to be dictated by mass protest constitutes a real danger to democracy, whatever the Conservatives may imply.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the protest, however, Tony Blair and his colleagues failed to recognise how widespread is the resentment at high tax on petrol and diesel oil - a tax which, as a percentage of the price, rises when oil companies put the price up. This suggests they have lost the habit of listening to their constituents. Focus groups are no substitute.

There are strong environmental arguments for reducing the number of vehicles on the road and the amount of fuel consumed.

Punishing motorists by taxation, however, does not achieve this. It will not do so unless there are satisfactory alternative ways of travelling, and that requires a massive investment in such things as railways and efficient, cheap, bus services. We are back to transport policy.

In the meantime, Tony Blair has a popular political credibility gap to close.

BILL KIRKMAN

The writer is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk.

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