Fuel for a duel

Dear commuter, how’s your journey panning out after you were woken by the sound of Ed Balls politicking about fuel duty? The shadow chancellor was a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves earlier (to say nothing of the tabloid press), laying out his opposition to the planned 3.02p fuel duty rise. He was on fine form, playing the caring shadow chancellor with the ease that Andrea Pirlo takes penalties. The rise would be, he said, ‘a real own goal’. Families are struggling. We’re in a recession. The price of oil has fallen by 20 per cent since Christmas but that has not been passed on to the consumer at the pumps. ‘The government should be pressuring oil companies to get the pump price down,’ he said.

Balls and Labour have been strongest and clearest when talking about the cost of living and the government’s inability to curb corporate greed. The calamitous juxtaposition of a top-rate income tax cut and a new levy on pasties was a gift made in Heaven for Balls, and fuel duty enables him to pull off the same trick.