Join the fuel protest on the 19th - have a look for the thread by The Chief on here...over 200 people are coming...

I would, and I fully support it, unfortunately I can't afford to join in. I wish I could. To be honest, I'm seriously tempted to get something going closer to home, whether people would bother joining in is a different matter, and so far out of the way of London, it may well have little impact. I really hope the protest you are all part of has an impact, at least you have tried to do something.

Perfectly put across Lisa wrx! An intelligent, well balanced view. Thank you.:)

Given people have taken the time to reply to my posts I will make the same effort.

Sideways, I probably am pretentious, but it is the only way to make a point on this forum without my voice being drowned out by the masses who live in Never Never Land.

Lisawrx, I appreciate it might seem that this thread has gone off at a tangent, but even that tangent takes us back to the same conclusion. People are looking for someone (i.e someone other than themselves) to bail them out. There is naff all money made from selling petrol. The petrol companies do marginally better than break even on this part of their business. It doesn't matter how successful their other departments are, you can't ask them to provide a service at a loss. The Government is just as impotent - when you add on the debt from Northern Rock it is in a terrible state. You could argue that the VAT reciepts from fuel are rising and therefore the Government should reduce the fixed rate tax to compensate. What you and everyone else is forgetting is that the high fuel prices are killing the economy and tax reciepts for most other sources are down on Government forecasts. So yes, fuel tax is up but all the others are down and are going to get worse.

Several people have said I shouldn't come on here and rant and should instead provide solutions. I did in fact provide a solution, but nobody liked it. We are at the beginning of a sustained period of high fuel/food/mortgage costs coupled with low growth and rising inflation. This is not going to be over in a few months. It is going to take years. So instead of complaining that other people should be doing something to help you you are going to have to help yourselves. If you drive a car with high running costs then now would be a good time to swap it for something cheaper. Yes, that means you won't have such a nice car. That is the reality of 2008 and beyond. Most people are also going to have to take a good hard look at all the other money they spend on luxuries in a way they never had to before.

I know I have a reputation as a boring, antagonistic old fart who's in love with the diesel engine, but a lot of people could do a lot worse than listen to what I'm saying. High costs are here to stay. If you're up against it financially then take action now. Don't expect a white knight to come gallopping over the horizon because he doesn't exist. I'm sorry I'm abrassive, but if that is what it takes to save some of you from ruin then I'm happy to continue taking the abuse.

PMSL i remember when the price in the "email" was about 24p/litre (or thereabouts) which shows you just how old this POS spam mail really is

Remember Petrol is still a lot cheaper than Lager :D

And then just wait for a new 'Pogo' and 'Mars Bar' tax to appear from the chancellor... :Suspiciou

Not that I'd drink it, but it's 92p for four cans of 'value' lager form tesco, so from my sums that's only 46p a litre. Ok it's crap, but it's still lager, the equivilent to normal unleaded so to speak. :p ;)

Lol Well in that case I might stop driving and get pi55ed more often :D

Seriously I'm just really fed up and frustrated with this country's attitude on cars, we are all easy targets for taxation and lets not even get started on speed camera's. ;)

Sideways

I wouldn't say that you come across as "pretentious" - I think "righteous" would be the word. Comments like "you can't prove me wrong" or similar won't help your cause!

You are however right in the fact that people are looking to be bailed out, but the someone other than themselves they're looking to is the government.

Your statement "There is naff all money made from selling petrol;" simply isn't true - companies make a fair amount of money from selling fuel, but the biggest taker is the government. I believe that tax accounts for over 70% of the cost of fuel now; so at least £37-40 goes to the government every time I fill up. Multiply that for every UK motorist and that's a LOT of money!

As for the whole Northern Rock debt - we didn't ask them to bail out Northern Rock and they shouldn't have done. The stockmarket is a volatile place; shareholders should expect to lose out. Labour had no place or right to intefere and I still stand by my view that they should have allowed the Rock to be sold off to another bidder - just as Bear Sterns in the US was.

It's not high fuel prices that are killing the economy - Brown already had killed the economy by borrowing far too much money and encouraging the public to do the same. He's now reaping the reward of that approach and people are being squeezed because of his mistakes.

"So yes, fuel tax is up but all the others are down and are going to get worse. " - also untrue I'm afraid. Let's start with the 10p rate shall we? How is that beneficial? They say 18 million families a year will be worse off, and I'm willing to bet they'll be the ones who are out working and paying their taxes.
Car tax? Up to 150% more for the drivers of large engined or "polluting" cars, and introduced retrospectively so it will impact and screw the used car market. But no moves by the government to actually use that money to improve the environment in any way. No let's build another runway at Heathrow....

I could go on but I don't need to.

It's easy enough to summarise as follows:
1) The majority of the current economic problems we're encountering have been caused by dodgy practices by banks and gambles by the treasury and the government. They haven't paid off and we're getting screwed as a result.

2) If the government hadn't thrown money away like it was growing on trees over the last 10 years we wouldn't be in nearly as bad a state as we are now.

3) True - there are no white knights but we don't need one. We just need to get this Jade Goody of a PM and his excuse of a government out and get someone in who can pull fingers out of places they don't belong, and manage public services efficiently and save us some cash. I'm sure whoever replaces them won't be perfect but one thing's for certain - they can't possibly be worse.

I think the main problem is people's perspective - many of them seem to seek to actively blame the petrol companies when the people who are ultimately screwing us are the government. If 70%+ of every litre sold goes to the government in tax, how on earth is it sensible or logical to blame anybody else for the high cost in fuel!?

I reckon to start with we should all refuse to pay council tax until MP's:
a) Are no longer paid to have a second home in London. A set of flats should be procured and shared out according to who needs them. It's simply not sensible to allow every MP to own two houses and expect us to foot the bill, and it will save us a few £7000 kitchen bills for a start! Just imagine how much the mortgage must cost on the houses these people are living in in London.

b) Are made to list their expenses publicly and are subject to a maximum spend limit per item after which they must be approved.

Of course that would never happen nowadays as people would be too scared to try it, and those that did would probably be arrested and charged with "terrorism" as that seems to be the blanket excuse nowadays for preventing public unrest being demonstrated on the streets.

Did you all know that the reason the hauliers haven't blockaded the refineries this time round is that the government have made that an offence now and can arrest them under the terrorism prevention act?

We're living in Nazi England - heaven help us.

Totally agree with you're views in this thread. Everything these days is geared towards being easy, which leads to everyone being soft and lazy. Health and safety is a joke now...I'm a steel erector and popped into the yard of a big shed building company near me to pick up some roof lights - the guy in the yard told me you have to use a cherry picker to get on top of your van now!! A mean :lol1: FFS!

All the politicians and people in charge of the way things are done in this country have lost all sense of reality when it comes to basic life. I mean, the health and safety tw@t that thought up that idea I mentioned above, has probably never had to do climb on top of a van in his life...he just sees statistics written down in front of him that show some people have been hurt doing something.

As I said, they've just lost all sense of reality. Up here for example, they spent hundreds of millions building a new parlaiment with pointless features like a room for each MP with a special window box where they can sit and ponder life for a while each day. I'm sure there were about 80 of those things, and they cost about £40000 each. :mad: It was something rediculous like that...when they could have put that money towards hospitals or any other area that requires urgent attention.

Alan

Dont know if this has been said already cos i got a third thu this post and got bored.

At the end of the day Shell / Esso and BP are almost the only oil refineries in the uk, so boycotting their garages wont help, all it will do is mean u spend the more demanding prices in the smaller local garages who sell smaller quantities, that......guess what......are bought from Shell / Esso and BP therefore all your doing is shooting yourself in the foot by paying premium rates, when these small garages pay premium rates to shell / esso and bp therefore actually increasing their profits.

Sure they wont be complaining. Dont know about the rest but i will stick to buying V power from shell as i know the quality of fuel is reliable and its one of the cheepest in my area

Shell v power 117.9p/ltr
Esso super 119.9p/ltr
Local garage normal octane crap 116.9p/ltr (By memory driving past)

Please dont take this the wrong way people as i know SOMETHING must be done to stop the price hike but we all need to come up with some other idea??

And a blockade on the countries motorways is out of the question now as our pathetic goverment has made it illegal and any hauliers doing so run the risk of loosing their carriers license.

Just thought id throw that in the pot.

coup d’état anyone?

Hmmm I think ill add my dodgy comments later ;)

Tony:D

Sod it :p

Bring back the tories, privatise the NHS (they were going to do that anyway), see how much will change from now (ie nothing), give us 15% interest rates, ahhhh the good old days :rolleyes:
Though Labour hasnt done all its promised, and ill agree on that, they are still better than the tories.

Tony:)

Thanks for such a long reply. It is probably down to my poor English, but I think you have misunderstood a few things I was trying to say. I'll start elaborating and see where this post goes.

When I said there was naff all money to be made out of petrol what I should have said was the petrol companies only generate a small percentage of their overall profits from the sale of petrol. For you and I a few hundred million quid is a lot of money, but in the terms of the £20-odd billion that the oil companies make each year it is almost small change.

I totally agree with you about Northern Rock. The Muppets could have done a better job. All Gordon Brown had to do was allow the bank to be sold to LloydsTSB, but that would have meant job losses in key Labour marginals at a time when he was planning to call a general election. Whether the whole episode was a collossal f*uck up or not is pretty much irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the Government now has a massive amount of debt on its books that is causing them all sorts of problems, not least limiting the amount of money they have to play with on a day to day basis.

High fuel prices are one of the root causes of our economy's problems. Not only are we spending a lot more on fuel and therefore pushing up inflation, we are also buying goods in the shops which were transported on trucks powered by petrol. This makes those goods more expensive which in turn pushes up inflation still further. This comes at a time when the economy is slowing and would traditionally benefit from a cut in interest rates but that isn't possible because it would fuel inflation. Tax cuts are not possible because, as you say, Gordon Brown has screwed up and there is no money available to pay for them. If oil was the same price as a year ago there would be room for the odd interest rate cut which would keep the housing market moving, free up cash and allow some growth to help negate some of the undesirable effects of inflation.

When I said all other tax revenues were going down I was referring to the total of all taxes. When you add them all up they are well below Government forecasts. You are however quite right to point out that several individual taxes are rising and that they are, rather inconveniently, the ones that affect us all directly and visibly. But, overall there is a huge tax shortfall.

Overall I agree with your summary. Poor Government which contributed to poor banking practices (don't get me onto that one) are the root of our problems. However, where we disagree is your final point. It is going to take much more than saving a few quid from making public services more efficient and the tinkering that would come with a change of Government. The mess is so big and many of the factors so far beyond our control that sorting it all out is going to take 2-3 years minimum.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

i havent read all the replys as i would lose the will to live but buoycutting a certain garage is justa waste off time

if you dont have the sense to realise that oil companies dont make much money from the sale off petrol then you need a huge wake up call, you cant argue at the profit they make do you think its cheap hiring the top scientists in the world to find new oil reserves buying drilling equipment, oil rigs, pipe lines, tankers and oil refineries and other stuff i have probably missed out.

all this stinking thieving government do its pluck a figure out and it on to the price and what do they actually contribute in processing the oil and transporting it NOTHING,

all they do is take, take take, if you want these muppetts to listen then the better idea is to blockaid the major ports off this country, how long do you think it would take for them to negotiate if heathrow,gatwick,dover and felixstowe were all blocked im guessing not long as people cant get in and out off the country, european and british lorries cant cross so firms lose goods and money and felixstowe is the biggest container port and i have worked off there as a driver and the place is always heaving, major disruption would get these inept idiots in office to the negotiating table

Can you name one thing that Labour promised that it's actually done (be honest now)?
It promised to fix the NHS, yet it might as well have privatised it in the amount of meddling it's done, and all they've managed to do is stop people wanting to go and work there thanks to poor working conditions, contract cleaners leading to MRSA, underpaid nurses and junior doctors.

As for the 15% interest rates - that was for oooooh...a whole day wasn't it? And over a decade ago. Why is it that Labour supporters always have to go back to the days of Maggie when making comparisons. Why don't you come up with some comparisons when the Tories handed over power to the Labour party back around '96 (I may be wrong on the year it was a long time ago!) rather than '86. After all, I don't think our economy was even in billions, let alone trillions of debt.

And how exactly are they better the Tories? Because they're not perceived as "posh"?
I don't avidly support the Tories, nor did I go to Eton or Oxford or Cambridge, but I'd rather have them in power than the Labour party because there's a small chance that they might actually listen to the people of this country and act on what the people are asking for - something the Labour party have managed to fail spectacularly at prior to and after the point they took our country to a war we wanted no part in. TBH if Jimmy frickin Saville stood for PM I'd vote for him over this bunch of idiots.

So what have they given us...hmmm....let's see.
1) Political Correctness. Great. An end to free speech and more rights to anyone who isn't English over anyone who is.
2) NHS - infest it with pen pushers and unnecessary management and try and run it like a business - result -> £000's are spent on people who contribute nothing to the NHS rather than being spent on the people it needs to function.
3) ASBO's and electronic tagging. What a success that's been. At least 3 or 4 people with tags drink down my local pub and like stirring up trouble. And they wear them like a badge of honour. ASBO's are the same - ultimately people ignore them and carry on regardless. There's no consequence to crime anymore thanks to the perceived softly softly approach by Labour.
4) The Millenium Dome. What a great investment of taxpayer money.
5) Northern Rock. As above.
6) Over a million (which probably means there are many millions knowing Labour stats) immigrants who were never needed in the first place if they'd bothered to sort out the benefit cheats, and encouraged businesses to invest in training of their English employees rather than taxing them out of existence. That's why businesses are moving their HQ's to Ireland and other places incase you hadn't noticed?
.....ad infinitum....

Oh but they've done a great job yes, so much better than Maggie.... :wonder: ;)

You could have elaborated more on tax rises, but otherwise :thumb: :notworthy

LOL - a thousand thanks :lol1:

Bugeye you speak the truth my friend:thumb:

People have been royally fecked over by this goverment.

Admittedly there are outside factors i.e. oil prices but Labour are not exactly doing anything to help bring it down simply because the revenue from taxation is that great.

I honestly cant think of anything good that this goverment has done for the average working man.

The goverment has become a self obsessed cesspit full of beurecracy, political correctness and dictatorship towards the people and busineses of this country who pay the taxes so they can lead the cushy lifestyle that they take for granted and have become accustomed to whilst dictating to us how we should run our lives:mad:

Cheers Chief - nicely summarised there!

The thing that scares me though is that so many people continue to take this daft blinkered approach that Labour are good and that Tories are evil.

Ultimately all politicians are evil - we've just got to think about what's best for ourselves and that's conclusively proved not to be Labour (unless you're a criminal or a benefit grabber (no disrespect intended to those who try hard to get jobs and can't) or an immigrant / asylum seeker!) over the last 10 years.

The fact that over 10,000 people voted for that Dunwoody woman in Crewe and Nantwich given everything that this country has suffered under Blair and Brown simply beggars belief. What exactly do those 10,000 people think Labour is doing for them?! I'm afraid they're examples of the flock of sheep who vote Labour because their mother and father did in the '70's and '80's, and continue to do so without actually realising how it will affect future generations to come.

Plus - she's described as an unemployed mother of 5 (so not a full time mother I'm assuming?) - hardly a shining example for the youth of today if it's true that she hasn't bothered even getting a job in the past is it!?

30,000+ so far....

Petition to: Reduce Fuel duty to bring fuel prices back to an acceptable level.