- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday September 13 2000 03.36 BST
- The Guardian, Wednesday September 13 2000
The government was all too clearly unprepared for the scale of it. On Monday evening, as the lights went out in service stations all over Britain, Mr Blair was still trying to keep a dinner date with John Prescott in Hull. Ministers had badly underestimated the forces ranged against them. What had begun as a rising of the Poujadist self-employed, a political constituency with which past Labour governments might have been only too happy to do battle, was now looking much more formidable. People whose roads were obstructed, who were forced to sit for hours in queues to fill up their tanks, seemed on the whole more upset by the chancellor's tax take than they were with those causing disruption. Whatever they thought of the tactics, they welcomed action which if successful would cut their own petrol bills.
So the government's message of "no surrender, wait for the budget" failed to find many takers. Nor did it play too well at the TUC yesterday, as Gordon Brown insisted that Labour must not amend its strategy to deal with an oil price increase which might prove only temporary. The trouble is that all experts see prices continuing to climb; none predicts a slipping back to acceptable levels. But by now, pertinent questions were surfacing as to how and why the protest movement has achieved such swift, overpowering success. Why have the pumps run dry when the picketing in many places was light, verging on vestigial? Why have oil companies made so little apparent effort to lift what in many places was hardly more than a token siege? Why, where the police had cleared the barricades out of the way, was nothing, even now, moving? One analyst even alleged that oil companies wanted to see the demonstrations succeed, in the hope that the chancellor would be forced to cut tax, thus boosting their takings.
The sun must have come out in Downing Street as the first signs appeared that the focus of public disquiet was switching from government unreadiness to oil company duplicity. But that could yet switch back again. Beyond Tony Blair's upbeat assessment and promised measures last night, he and Mr Brown need to move fast and purposefully to recapture control of the agenda. They need to be far more robust in defending taxes on petrol as essential to protect our threatened environment. They need to show that the Treasury's windfall from petrol price increases (a mere £400m in the past year, the chancellor says) will not simply disappear into the Treasury's maw, but be used for the public's long-term benefit through spending on enhanced public transport and investment in alternative sources of power. They must also resist the temptation to talk, as Jack Straw regrettably did yesterday, as if all street demonstrations, whatever their cause, constitute a form of disruption which society should not tolerate. Where disruption takes forms which are clearly illegal, there must be action to stop it. Where it is merely troublesome and discomforting for authority, no government with any liberal pretensions should try to deny its legitimacy.
