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Motorists are being warned to expect disruption as hundreds of lorry drivers head into London to protest about fuel prices. The two-pence-per-litre fuel tax rise, proposed by the Government, has triggered direct action from hauliers.
Lorry convoys are said to be forming on the M4 in Wales, the M2 in Kent, the A40, and the M25 orbital motorway around London. Many are expected to converge on Whitehall before handing in a petition at 10 Downing Street.
Hauliers claim that the proposed increas...Read the full article

The AA estimated that the average Bank Holiday car journey cost the nation’s drivers £110 million more this year than last. Last week Edmund King, its president, wrote to Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, asking him to delay still further the 2p per litre fuel duty increase, already postponed from April to October. He said: “Prices look like they will stay high for the medium term so we are saying to the Chancellor that he should forget any idea of adding to fuel taxes in October.” A Treasury spokesman said: “The immediate priority is to encourage oil-producing countries in Opec to increase output to help bring down fuel prices.”

I just read this on The Times website, I fail to see how the Treasury is putting any pressure on the countries in Opec to increase oil output; seems to me they're only encouraging limited supplies by raising the price on fuel duty so oil companies know what the people are willing to pay for it!

Right, off to the local chippy for some cooking oil it is then, mind you they probably won't have any due to the price of fish and chips going up!

Luke, don't fall for the bullshit from Her Majesty's Treasury. It's got squat to do with OPEC. OPEC countries are only 40% of oil production. Blame the same bastards who ramped the price of housing (a Ponzi/pyramid scheme) from '95 to '06. They're now at it with oil and food. Lack of affordable housing's serious; lack of affordable food and oil is lethal.

Don't listen to the lying criminals in HM Govt, the BBC, Sky News, HM's Official Opposition.... This country(UK) is bought and paid for by the bankers. The rest of Europe are not so stupid or easily gulled. The French and German govts. are today demanding an end to speculaton by hedge funds in the price of oil and food. The German President has called these, mainly City of London/Cayman Islands residing scum, 'monsters'. They are also described as 'locusts' and 'parasites' openly on the continent. In the UK, aided by the mainstream media liars, they are called 'entrepreneurs' and 'wealth generators' for the UK. Have a guess why the UK is f*cked as a result, for anyone short of a billionaire, as a decent place to live in or raise a family.

See "Germany in call for ban on oil speculation" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/05/26/cnoil126.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox  ,27/5/2008, and note that the lying shill journo author protects the real criminal scum by blaming OPEC again at the bottom - in case the brainwashing hasn't worked yet.

 

Loather - yes the speculators make the price rise higher. But when the speculators come out the price falls faster too.I'd be interested to know how much money has piled into oil and food from London and the Cayman Islands. My guess is it's mainly coming from normal investment funds and banks running for cover from the property decline.

Either way it deflects from government obesity (high taxation to fund high spending). 300% tax on fuel is a scandal? That's a basic everyday commodity - would we accept it on eggs, milk and bread - why do we accept this government greed?

The problem is no political Party has cutting the obese size of government on the agenda - now 50% our entire national GDP - if you don't cut the size of Govt and its spending you can't cut tax. If you can't cut tax you can't improve peoples standards of living. Taxation has destroyed standards of living over the last 15yrs. Nobody mentions this!

This is the deceipt of the people by all 3 major Parties. A political Club that protects an obese machine that consumes more and delivers less as the money disappears into cronies pockets and corrupt Public-Private schemes and subsidies of bankrupt businesses (congestion-zone, trains, bus Co's, Ethanol just to mention the transport sector!).

You blame corrupt speculators for driving up crude prices. I blame this obese Government machine that gets fatter and delivers less and our corrupt political Parties for not putting this greed machine on a sevre crash diet.

JJ, we have common ground here. My point is the bankers are the puppetmasters of the elected pols. The pols do their bidding. One example. The UK Govt has just given a £50 billion 'loan' to UK Banks Inc. - out of Lombard Street and Caymans addresses. That 50 bigones as anyone with a brain knows will effectively never be repaid. Add this to the £25 billion tipped into NRock and there's £75 billion or over a £1000 for every man, woman and child of national debt repayments to be repaid with interest to the same shyster bankers who just got bailed out by Joe Soap. Jesus, and they talk about socialism. Socialism never died, it just got privatized for the exclusive use of zillionaires. That's why, just the latest example, JJ, that taxes cannot go down in this country. The country's broke - sweet f.a. real wealth generation sector, i.e. value-adding manufacturing - and in hock to the mega-criminal, internationalist banking scum. As you probably know JJ America never had federal income tax until 1913 when traitorous elected pols in its Congress allowed the creation of all US money to be given to a private bank, the US Federal Reserve. The US Govt. has to borrow the US's money from this bank and repay it with interest. The income tax goes straight from every citizen to the Fed Reserve to pay off the mounting interest on the 'loaned' money. It's the largest swindle in human history. BUT, the prototype for it was the Bank of England -  the first private bank given monopoly power over a country's money, in 1693. The Bank of England was supposedly nationalized in 1947, but acts still in the same manner as the US Fed, representing the small number of family-group shareholders behind the scenes.

So my point is oil is controlled and manipulated by the same entities that own the banks and ensnared Joe Public to mortgage himself to the hilt in the last decade. Now the debts from the housing crash in the US and UK have been dumped with taxpayers. The banks have been given bundles of new printed up cash, somewhere in the region of 1 triilion dollars 'injected'(read printed) alone since the 'sub-prime crash' last August to play with. Guess what? Infation in the prices of oil, food and other basic commodities took off with a vengeance starting last August. Coincidence? No! The money supply in the US and UK is expanding at 20% per annum and increasing. The banks are loaning out this trillion dollar bounty to the hedge-fund speculators - don't believe me, read George Soros's interview in the Telegraph yesterday. He confirms it is speculators driving the oil price bubble.

So the UK Govt., whether Lab/Lib/Con, are obliged to keep levying more and more taxes as the underlying productive economy shrinks and more and more is borrowed to pay for current spending to maintain the illusion of prosperity. The more borrowing the more interest to be repaid, the more taxes. The more taxes the productive sector shrinks further. A vicious circle ending in debt default like Labour in 1976 with IMF loans or hyperinflation like Argentina in the 1980s or Zimbabwe currently.

loather:

So the UK Govt., whether Lab/Lib/Con, are obliged to keep levying more and more taxes as the underlying productive economy shrinks and more and more is borrowed to pay for current spending to maintain the illusion of prosperity. The more borrowing the more interest to be repaid, the more taxes. The more taxes the productive sector shrinks further. A vicious circle ending in debt default like Labour in 1976 with IMF loans or hyperinflation like Argentina in the 1980s or Zimbabwe currently.

The really annoying thing is that if they spent the money wisely and didn't waste any then we wouldn't be on this rather slippery slope to oblivion or certainly sliding down it a lot slower.

I agree the banks have an awful lot to answer for as they have an immense hold over the government but it is primarily down to the governement and they should stand up to them.

The graph in the other thread on the price rise in fuel really puts the rise into perspective.  If everything else rose as fast as that then virtually everyone in the country would be bankrupt.

Loather - you're well ahead of me on money supply and international markets. It's a bit 'rich' George Sorros saying the oil bubble is due to speculators. The £Sterling crisis in the 80's was due to Sorros speculating the pound was overvalued. He made a fortune out of shorting the market. Has he got a problem with other speculators running a bull market in Oil?

Manufacturing and real resources creates the real wealth of a country I agree. The Govt has been hung up and over-influenced by London and the bankers to the undoubted poverty of the country. You can't 'bank' your way out of a recession you just shift the deckchairs on the titanic.

And while Germany has tripled its balance of trade surplus over the past 5 years Britain has quadrupled its balance of trade deficit. The pie is getting smaller while John Prescott and Gordon Brown eats more and more of their fair share of the pie to fund their waistline.

But again I'm not sure I agree with you how clever our economies central banks and the financial institutions are! Merryl Linch the biggest of em all is like all the rest up sh*t creek without a paddle. I agree Northern Rock, RBS/NatWest et al. are being bailed out by consumers one way (by Brown) or another (raising loan and interest rates). And the central banks (Fed and BoE) aren't rolling in cash but rolling in debt.

Printing money is printing debt. And yes it leads to inflation as money loses its value. Maybe Sorros is preparing for another raid on the currency markets eh!

I agree all the way regards British Govt finances and bailing out the banks. But either way the UK public sector needs a major crash diet... a min. 30% cut in face-stuffing, tax-grabbing obesity off the living standards of the people. All 3 political Parties do not offer major public spending cuts which is why they are irresponsible, empty, washed up wind bags.

   

Two points SpecB:

"If everything else rose as fast as that then virtually everyone in the country would be bankrupt."  - Everything else is and yes the country is(bankrupt). That's the mainstream media(MSM)'s job to keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit(the mushroom syndrome). And with the BBC you get to pay for the privilege - licence fee/tax - of being lied to. Only in the UK. As they say, Orwell predicted all this in '1984', but perhaps a few years out, that's all.

Petrol/Diesel has risen by around 30% in the last 12 months. Fact. Yes the 'official' CPI figure is 3% but that's frigged - can provide details of how they do it. As a single for instance did you know that ONS, the offiicial Govt statisticians, who you and I pay to do the inflation figures, use a 80:20 consumption ratio of petrol to diesel for weighting puposes? Can you guess why? Well actual consumption of petrol to diesel is about 50:50. As diesel has increased in price faster than petrol over the last 12 months in particular, by using this ridiculous 80:20(petrol:diesel) split the overall effect of the diesel price hike is camouflaged or suppressed. Imagine 40% price rise diesel and 20% petrol and 80:20 weighting applied. That's an overall price rise of (40x.2)+(20x.8)=24%; whereas with 50:50 theoverall price rise should be (40x.5)+(20x.5)=30%; a 6% reducing difference. This is precisely how the Govt and its lackey satisticians lie to you. It is no different to old communist Russia and record tractor production/harvest figures bollocks. The one thing they cannot massively massage is the Producer Prices Index, which records the rate of price change for inputs - raw materials, fuel, electricity and so on - into factories, also published by ONS. Since start of 2008 this figure has been running between 20-30%, the annual rate of price increase. This must eventually feed through to wholesalers and retailers, lest they go bankrupt first. Don't forget also that in addtion to 30% rise in fuel in 12 months, food, especially cereals, which go to feed most all livestock, has tripled in price in the last 18 minths. Eggs for instance have doubled in price from about 90p/half dozen to £1.80.

Second point: "I agree the banks have an awful lot to answer for as they have an immense hold over the government but it is primarily down to the governement and they should stand up to them." - whistle on son. Democracy is a cruel myth. The pols do not work for you and I, they work for the moneylenders and in return they get to keep their noses in the trough and immunity from jail. Want an example. Are you hoping that Cameron and his conservatives put right all that's gone wrong over the last decade? Well, the largest single donor to George Osborne's shadow treasury office is a Lady Serena Rothschild. £600,000 alone last year. Name ring a bell? Who owns the US Fed central bank and most all other central banks and investment banks in the world? Rothschild? N.M Rothschild & Son, London? Who pays the piper calls the tune. And as for a democratic government's job to represent the populace and stand up to the moneylenders, the last western democrat leader who tried that - President J F Kennedy - was publicly executed in broad daylight with three shots through his head. He had passed six months beforehand an executive presidential order removing the monopoly right of the Fed Reserve central bank to issue US money. Look up Executive Order EO11110 on the internet if you don't believe me. This order at a stroke did away with the unimaginable profit-making of this private bank and the half-dozen or so family groups that owned it. Oh and prior to 2003's invasion Iraq's central bank was not under these small group of families' control and Saddam had also announced he was ditching the dollar for oil payments. You work it out.

loather:

"If everything else rose as fast as that then virtually everyone in the country would be bankrupt."  - Everything else is and yes the country is(bankrupt). That's the mainstream media(MSM)'s job to keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit(the mushroom syndrome). And with the BBC you get to pay for the privilege - licence fee/tax - of being lied to. Only in the UK. As they say, Orwell predicted all this in '1984', but perhaps a few years out, that's all.

Oh yes, Big Brother has been here a while.

Thanks for the info on the fuel weighting - I knew they fiddled the figures but wasn't sure how they did it.

I also knew about the cereals and other food - they have only just started to catch up with the level of fuel rises but it is all related.

loather:

Democracy is a cruel myth. The pols do not work for you and I, they work for the moneylenders and in return they get to keep their noses in the trough and immunity from jail. Want an example. Are you hoping that Cameron and his conservatives put right all that's gone wrong over the last decade?

I quite agree with you - no future power is going to have the balls to reverse it and I am under no illusions about this - the future is rather bleak.

JJBoxster:

But either way the UK public sector needs a major crash diet... a min. 30% cut in face-stuffing, tax-grabbing obesity off the living standards of the people.

Bang on. I've maintained for more than a year elsewhere(I try to remember this is a car forum) that the UK is in for a 10% of GDP minimum spending cut austerity program. That's approx £140 billion. The public finances are overspent by 4% of GDP minimum and the country runs a 6% of GDP trade deficit. It's just basic sums. The whole country is living beyond its means. The gap had been filled till last year by borrowing, both by government and the individual. This is no longer possible.

JJ, if the politicians, of whatever colour, won't cut spending and taxes then sooner or later the IMF or probably international, private UK gilt holders will force the UK into an austerity programme. It's gonna happen regardless. The Labour pols are just hoping to hang on for 2010 and a recovery and election before announcing the whole thing's a bust.

Loather, I don't believe anything I hear at all these days, especially when I hear words like "right man for the job" and then seeing the living standards of the good people of Britain go down the pan on a daily basis...

Reading your posts regarding the state of so called 'democracy' and the banks is really quite depressing even though it is entirely obvious, afterall, money makes the world go round and if you haven't got any, then you don't have a voice.

You're all very right about austerity as an enevitability of this governments spending.  I'm not sure which public service I'd like to see less spending on though, I know there's alot of money being raked in with taxes but really I have no idea where any of it going?

I don't understand how government gets us in this mess though, how does the advice of so many economists get ignored? I suppose again it's all down to greed and making the quick buck in the end... It's like the bank has the government bent over a big pile of money with a roll of 50's up it's arse, it's their own fault though, but they don't care because they have us to pay for it! I still don't understand though... it's basic maths, if income is less than spending then we're living beyond our means, how can someone get this wrong and not get the wrap for it?

Please excuse my ignorance too, I've only really began to ask these sort of questions.

Luke mate, no need to excuse any supposed ignorance. You're okay.

Don't despair. What the hauliers are doing is right and the beginning of a fight-back. Economically things are definitely going to get much worse. However, this is inadvertently what people need to wake up.

The UK and its indigenous peoples need to realise that the dream sold to them, and bought by many unfortunately, of consumption without production, on the back of ever-rising house prices, was just that, a fairytale. There's no viable alternative to production and making things as the bedrock of any sustainable society. Yes we can have high-end services and indeed a responsible, vastly slimmed-down banking sector. But the days of 1% industry financing to 99% speculative investment by banks has got to end.