Drive-By “Crikey, how much?”
personally I blame the..? TV News broadcasters.
Oh yes, the astonishing latest fuel costs really are something to groan about, and I did plenty of grumbling when I was recently obliged to cough up a penny chew less than £1.50 for just a litre of diesel sludge from my local supermarket’s fuel station.
Why TV news broadcasters? Because if you think back over the period since the first lockdown, even allowing for the main protagonists in my previous list, our fuel prices were reasonably stable throughout.
Given that we stuck to our guns and never adopted measuring travelling distance by the kilometre used pretty much everywhere else on the planet, and stuck with the, brilliantly good for centuries, statute mile, I presume we started selling fuel by the litre as a sop to the EU (probably after previously blithely signing up to yet another lengthy tome of unread legalise that had been generated by some of Brussel’s overpaid bureaucrats with too much time on their hands) and £1.50 per litre doesn’t sound too horrendous if you say it quickly, and certainly infinitely more palatable than the same cost in good old fashioned gallons which works out at a mindboggling £6.76 a gallon, dear God!
Stable that is, right up to the point that the TV news people decided that a few petrol stations in the London area running out of unleaded due to some minor delivery issues was worthy of a major report slot on prime-time evening national news, because, you know, London. Report evening after evening after evening… “No need to panic” said all the experts involved, “there’s plenty of fuel and no problems anywhere else in the country”.
Fine in principle, but the great UK public promptly decided that Armageddon was obviously descending upon us all and that a full tank of fuel, even if it wasn’t their usual time for their fortnightly top up, I’ve heard a number of reasons and was their absolute priority above all else rationales being purported for the in their lives and, ‘et voila’, constant current cost of keeping the fuel tank wet queues at all the petrol stations in the in your chosen jalopy: Brexit, Covid, nation and, now, a genuine fuel shortage troubles in the Middle East and for the TV news broadcasters to bang on opportunistic price setting by the OPEC about as the fuel suppliers struggled to nations being principle among many, but keep up with this near instant maximum
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