‘We have no plans not to implement our budget’: the double negative employed by Phil Woolas, the Environment Minister, on Tuesday’s Newsnight, and the familiar ‘no plans’ formula, told you all you need to know about this government’s collapse of confidence. On the matter of retrospective Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) increases, ministers are desperate to execute a U-turn as quickly and as painlessly as possible — one which, in any case, they fear they will be forced into sooner or later. Equally, Gordon Brown does not want to be seen to be bowing — yet again — to popular pressure, so soon after the 10p tax debacle. It is hard to reconcile ‘long-term decisions’ with budgets rewritten on the back of an envelope. Truly, this government is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
This week, in scenes reminiscent of the 2000 fuel mutiny, truckers converged on London to protest over the separate issue of fuel duty. The Prime Minister’s instinctive response was to internationalise the pain of the motorist (so eloquently expressed by Bryan Forbes on page 20). ‘The global economy is facing the third great oil shock of recent decades,’ he wrote in Wednesday’s Guardian. ‘There is no easy answer to the global oil problem without a comprehensive international strategy.’
It is certainly true that Opec is a relic from the 1970s, when there was a prevailing distrust of free markets and a mistaken belief that protectionism guarded the creation of wealth. But Opec’s general secretary, Abdalla Salem El-Badri, is probably right to say that a sudden increase in production would not guarantee the desired fall in the price of crude oil, which last week breached $130 a barrel. Rising demand from China, which has been widely blamed for the current surge in prices, is part of the story.
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