Paul License: Speaking Out

I don't know about you but all too often I feel just as much a commodity as the stuff packed and parcelled on the shelves in a supermarket.

And nowhere is this more intensely felt than when I fill the tank of my car. I may just as well open my wallet and invite the Government to take as much as they like.

Now I know that there are some out there who will have not a speck of sympathy for me.

In their world, I wouldn't have a car of my own. In fact, none of us would.

Cars are the spawn of the climate changing devil, responsible for everything from the threat of extinction hovering over polar bears to the floods which engulfed hard working people's homes in South Yorkshire this summer.

Their engines pollute and the roads needed are an encroachment on our way of life.

Etc, etc, etc...

And the people who chant this mantra sit back on their bicycle seats with smug satisfaction as motorists pay more and more for their petrol.

Why? Are they happy that families are poorer, courtesy of yet another hike in taxation that we saw the other day when another 2p was slapped on a litre of petrol?

They will probably argue that this increase will make people think twice about making what they believe to be unnecessary journeys by car.

I have two things to say to that: leave me to decide what is necessary or not, and wake up and smell the coffee. There is absolutely no sign that fewer journeys are being made as more and more increases are piled on to the price of petrol.

This isn't a Government crusade to keep people off the roads, it is simply a means of raising money from an obvious and reliable source - our reliance on personal transport.

You see, we use our cars because they are a symbolic extension of what is so great about this country - they offer freedom. In the same way that we are guaranteed freedom of expression in political and cultural matters, so we are also allowed freedom of movement.

The Government knows this, accepts this - and profits from this.

And what can we, the customers - the people who are supposed to know best - do about it?

Well, one idea came via email this week which I will pass on without comment:

"We are hitting 99.9p a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying over 1 a litre!

"The 'don't buy petrol on a certain day' campaign that was going around last April or May only left the oil companies laughing - they knew we wouldn't continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them.

"But here's plan that just might really work.

"Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is cheap, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that buyers control the market place, not sellers.

What do you think? Post your comments below. We consumers need to take action...and the only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their petrol. And we can do that without hurting ourselves.

“For the rest of this year, if you can avoid it, don’t purchase any petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP. If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It’s really simple to do!

“I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it to at least 10 more (30 x 10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it.....THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!

“All you have to do is send this to 10 people...and not buy at ESSO/BP.

“Please hold out until they lower their prices to 69p a litre.”

Fanciful? Impossible? Perhaps. But the other week, I hired a car in Greece and, guess what? I paid about 69p for a litre of petrol.