Brown faces the horror of the petrol pumps

toco

And to think the hapless one sold all our gold for 25% of its current value.The only economics the dysfunctional Brown understands is being economical with the truth.

stepney

And however the Government try to spin the price rises on those greedy oil companies let a thousand souls howl the fact the 81% of the price is tax.

81%.

And also don't forget that when we pay for petrol we are paying the tax and then VAT on top of it. So we're being taxed on the tax we're paying.

Every time you fill up you're being mugged.

THX1138

The Tories very sensibly brought in the fuel price escalator.. Fuel is a good thing to tax, we have choice in how much we drive and in what vehicle we drive it in and therefore how much tax we choose to pay. Not a choice afforded to us with income tax.

ollie

Lol this clip reminds us all what a flat footed, hectoring oaf Brown truly is. His MO is the same now as it was then - try to intellectualise your answers to bamboozle the listening audience. Problem is, people aren't as stupid as Brown thinks.

Kennybhoy

This correlation goes back aways. Even unto Blair's heyday.

The petrol crisis of Autumn 2001 saw William Hague's Conservatives briefly overtake New Labour in the polls.

Rhoda Klapp

THX, daft, tax is to make money. Not ot encourage rel or imagined virtue. If we avoided fuel duty (after all, we could just get a taxi..) he'd tax us elsewhere.

Just a thought. Has Gordon Brown actually touched a petrol pump in his life? Fair chance he has not. Or ever paid for fuel.

Titus Aduxas

It's worth listening further, particularly about what is going to happen "in the next few months" because of new Govt measures.

Stuart Beamish

"Fuel is a good thing to tax, we have choice in how much we drive" ~ Unless we're delivering goods, or going to work where there is no public transport, or using public transport.#
Raising the price of petrol is only a good thing if you are offering practical alternatives. There is no integrated transport policy.

Kennybhoy

Oops! That should of course read "Autumn 2000" not 2001! Mea culpa!

Gary Williams

Rhoda,

Brown has never had a driving licence.

THX,

Many people do not have a choice in how much they drive, unless you believe that we should be forced to earn a living without ever leaving home and to grow our own vegetables.
Then again, that dystopia is probably part of the Labour vision.

shaun g

When will the public wake up .we have been ripped off for years since the tory escalator policy and Labour have followed suit convincingly.Over £5.00 a gallon never mind per litre.We screemed at £ 1.00 per gallon, were has our sense gone .C02 has become the road tax,V.A.T has become the top up tax and so on .No party would have been in power long in the days when it mattered too them.Thats what they want in Politics to- day ,and anybody who dissagrees with them or puts up an argument to their poliices is classed as a sceptic

Marbury

"It shows that, over the past few years, the Tories' strongest poll positions coincided with a high in the petrol price."

Is that what it shows? Or does it show just one instance of high price/high lead correlation?

The petrol price has been rising over the last couple of months, as the Tory lead had fallen.

Ps: to everyone who keeps going on about the gold sale: if Brown had lucked out (playing the markets is largely a question of luck) and sold high, would you be acclaiming him as an economic genius? No, of course you wouldn't. So give it a rest.

Moriarty

@Rhoda.

Now let's not encourage him. Our fire service is overstretched as it is.

oldtimer

The clip is nine minutes of Brown waffle. I cannot think of any of his predictions that came true.

michael m

When the pound is devalued by so much againts the dollar- another 2% in the last week, then it is not surprising is going up! QED

Nicholas

"Fuel is a good thing to tax, we have choice in how much we drive and in what vehicle we drive it in and therefore how much tax we choose to pay."

A fatuous comment that those who live in the countryside, where public transport is non-existent, and have to commute to work will find ridiculous. So move to the town? OK, what if everyone did that?

There is an element of choice, no doubt, especially in what type of vehicle to drive. But last time I looked there was no tax concession at the pumps on economical vehicles. So there is still an issue of inequality around the provision of practical public transport between town and country dwellers.

Inequality? From New Labour? Dear me. Unfortunately New Labour's whole concept of life in Britain is from a trendy, child oriented, bien pensant, urbanite and lately decidely East German perspective. If you don't fit the categories you don't matter.

Nicholas

Rhoda, he probably leaned on a petrol pump holding his carrier bag full of bricks, while the friend he had cadged a lift from to the party filled up his car.

The Bellman

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed this interview as theatre of the macabre. By the sound of his voice - the way a psychotic artificial intelligence machine might simulate 'charming and unthreatening' - this was the point when Bruin was on his highest dosage. Hence, I suppose, his attempt to blame UK pump prices on 'political instability in the Arab world'.

And his big lovely happy friendly grin when Fern asks about shared equity! 'Well, now,' he says, beaming like a games master at shower time, 'shared equity is really interesting!' He might as well have added 'isn't it, boys and girls.'

mart

"Yes, I know, cause and correlation aren't the same thing"

Peter, you have made my day. If only all articles were so prefaced.

TGF UKIP

Ultra PC, Blair and Heir worshipping, N London green headbanger THX 1138, once again reminds us of that legendary episode of South Park which so vividly demonstrated why insufferable smugness and Prius owning are indivisible.

Mind you encouraging all the smug bastards to drive a Prius might be the swiftest way of disposing of them permanently.

TGF UKIP

Pete, by implication you pre-suppose that the Cameron Clique are capable of correlating in the voters' minds the link between, high debt a falling currency and a high petrol price.

Demonstrably they're not, as the Naughtie fiasco with Clarke demonstrated this morning when the word debt was barely mentioned other than by the 8 o'clock female newsreader who managed to conflate debt with deficit in virtually consecutive sentences - all part of the BBC/Labour joint campaign no doubt.

Lucky lucky Brown to have so an absolutely incapable opposition.

Moraymint

We ain't seen nothing yet ...

http://tinyurl.com/yjbltfj

startledcod

Fern's interviewing is excellent, somewhat reminiscent of Jimmy Young who was a great inquisitor because he was unfailingly olite and quiet but just asked the simplest of questions. Fern should hugely increase her knowledge (JY was very well up on things) so that she could really lay waste to the avoidances and obfuscations.

FB - Prime Minister, you repeatedly talk about reducing the deficit in four years but never mention reducing the debt which will continue to increase. Why is this?

Angry

This makes me so angry, I'm a London Cabbie and instead driving the 5 miles less a day to make a difference to the environment I'm having to drive 20 miles a day MORE to pay for the increase in fuel' at the moment I'm already paying £10 A DAY more than last year thats without the latest increases, 80% is TAX on TAX on TAX. You can count on me NOT voting for you GORDON.

ben

I hope we can see more interviews given by Fern Britton before the election

THX1138

Rhoda & TGF I wasn't making a hair shirted green comment, rather I was just stating the fact that if you decide to commute 100 miles a day in BMW X5, ultimately it's your choice to pay huge amounts in tax..

Olaf

I don't know how high the price of petrol will go but it will get there steadily. The oil companies don't want a massive spike that will actually push people off oil. They need to keep us addicted, you can't make money from a dead junky.
They are probably just as pissed off at Brown for making fuel so expensive that the alternatives are becoming viable.

Alex

"rather I was just stating the fact that if you decide to commute 100 miles a day in BMW X5, ultimately it's your choice to pay huge amounts in tax.."

No, what you mention now is completely different to what you mentioned initially.

Typical left whinger. Always spinning gibbberish.

anne allan

THX1138 - how naive are you? Everything you buy is transported to the point of sale. The ingredients that went into everything you buy were transported to their place of manufacture. Your post is delivered by petrol or diesel powered vehicles. Public transport is powered by oil based products. My window cleaner needs a car to run his business.
Mr. & Mrs. Bloggs going by bus to the supermarket will not make a ha'porth of difference to the increasing costs of keeping this country movng. That cost that will be reflected in everything that we consume, whether material objects or services.

Rhoda Klapp

I tried driving five miles less a day, but I got fed up with the walk home.

Pete Hoskin

Marbury: fair point, and one I considered making in my post (but, as you no doubt know, you can say too much in a single blog post). Figured I'd covered myself with the first sentence. And, besides, the plural "Tories' strongest poll positions" is meant to refer to the clump of results around the petrol price spike - not their strongest poll positions over the last few years, generally. My fault that that's not clearer - will tweak it now.

THX1138

Alex My point was always about Tax and it stands, with fuel tax you have a choice in how much tax you pay with Income tax you don't. I fail to see how that obvious fact is anyway controversial..

Why is that you always seem to see some idiot being interviewed next to a bloody great 4X4 bleating about fuel prices! D'oh! If you don't like spending a fortune on fuel don't buy a vehicle that only does 15 miles to the gallon, where in your tiny little brain did you think it was going to get cheaper to run. And don't look to the Tories, they ain't going to help, it's your stupid fault for buying the gas guzzler in the first place.

TrevorsDen

Its one thing to bring in a fuel, price escalator to steadily get us to buy more economic cars, but once the tax has reached a certain level - its time to stop.

I have already seen petrol at 118p/ltr

TrevorsDen

Never mind car ownership (does anybody believe that Brown has ever owned a car) has Brown ever cycled to work?

TomTom

Why do I pay Council Tax to subsidise private railway companies on local lines ? Why do I pay petrol taxes to subsidise diesel for polluting private company buses ?

Why do we spend over £1 billion subsidising diesel for buses ?

With hospitals, schools, post offices and food retailers ever more remote from residential areas why are we taxed so heavily to drive to such places ?

The Conservatives simply offer us more of the same, more fuel taxes

Gary Williams

THX,

"Why is that you always seem to see some idiot being interviewed next to a bloody great 4X4 bleating about fuel prices! D'oh! If you don't like spending a fortune on fuel don't buy a vehicle that only does 15 miles to the gallon, where in your tiny little brain did you think it was going to get cheaper to run."

Why is it that you always seem to see some ... being interviewed (or writing on the internet) bleating about other people's reasonable preferences, as he is incapable of grasping the injustice of the government's disproportionately penalising those reasonable preferences?

"D'oh!"

AndyinBrum

I'm happy with the fuel escalator in times of plenty, but in recesionand facing inflation, capping the tax on fuel to keep it at 90p say, and then raise it when the economy's on the way up

Simon Stephenson

Marbury : 10.52am

"Ps: to everyone who keeps going on about the gold sale: if Brown had lucked out (playing the markets is largely a question of luck) and sold high, would you be acclaiming him as an economic genius? No, of course you wouldn't. So give it a rest."

It's fair enough to criticise those who are attacking Brown's gold-sale policy solely from the point of view of hindsight. But, in fact, there were major contemporaneous misgivings about both the wisdom of the policy and the price-efficacy of the process by which the gold was sold.

Maybe you should read:-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1655001.ece

and see whether or not you agree with me that the warnings given to Brown and his team, which they ignored, actually largely come true. OK, the decision to sell the gold may be seen as a political decision, where Brown can be assumed to have a competence to override the advice of his non-political experts, but the railroading through of the sale processes, against advice, was not political at all. It was surely a real instance of the arrogant Brown's lack of regard for expert advice costing the nation a very significant amount of money, was it not?

SUSAN HILL

But would Cameron be able to bring petrol prices down for the foreseeable, that's the problem ?

Michael Booth

With a tax on fuel you can choose how much you pay, can you? Not if you live in the country you can't, when there's no bus service or indeed local taxi service you can call on, when the village shop has closed and you have to drive ten miles or so to the local market town... fine for metropolitan types, but believe me it is not fine for country dwellers

toni

@TrevorsDen
Has Brown ever owned a car?
Hopefully not as he'd be a liability being blind in one eye?
Has Brown ever cycled to work?
Erm.. doesn't he live over the shop?
He could have cycled in from No 10 to No 11 or No 11 to No 10, therefore not requiring a following limo carrying the briefcase?
Unless you meant him cycling in from Chequers or his constituency?

Gary Williams

Marbury,

"Ps: to everyone who keeps going on about the gold sale: if Brown had lucked out (playing the markets is largely a question of luck) and sold high, would you be acclaiming him as an economic genius? No, of course you wouldn't. So give it a rest."

Sorry, but your presumption is quite wrong. If he had done as you imagine, people who understand these things would have thought, "He is incompetent as a finance minister, he is disgracefully petty, selfish and divisive as a leader, but at least the guy has a bit of common sense."

Playing the markets is often a question of luck, but not for everyone. If the circumstances did not enable him to sell into strength, he should at least have had the scintilla of humility required to defer to people who demonstrably were vastly more experienced in these matters than he was.

The sad fact for all of us is that Brown was out of his depth as Chancellor, he is out of his depth as PM, and he's the only person in the room who does not understand that.

toni

"Why is that you always seem to see some idiot being interviewed next to a bloody great 4X4 bleating about fuel prices!"

Fur coat and no knickers syndrome.

Ali C

Not only did the former chancellor sell the gold when the market was rock bottom, he announced it to the market in advance, so the price went even lower, if I recall correctly.

brilliant

Marcher Baron

"Fuel is a good thing to tax, we have choice in how much we drive" There speaks a man who lives in a town with decent public transport! Where I live, unless I'm prepared to spend all day travelling and risk not being able to get back the same day, I've no choice but to drive if I want to go anywhere beyond walking or cycling range, especially if I have to be there at a specific time. I would object less to the imposition of swingeing taxes on fuel if there were a viable alternative in fast, frequent, clean, reliable, affordable and accessible public transport.

Fergus Pickering

THX, a purchase tax is a tax on the poor; graduated income tax is a tax on the rich. I suppose you are quite rich so of course you prefer VAT and excise taxes to income tax. But the rest of us feel differently. You are like those people Orwell castigated who said the poor should give up fags and beer.

THX1138

I note nobody disagrees with me that even in the country you can reduce your fuel tax bill by driving a more fuel efficient vehicle. Yes TGF is right I do drive a Prius & not because of it's green credentials but rather because I hate tax. The VED on the Prius is £30 as is my CO2 based parking permit in Islington (It's over £300 for a big 4X4), I don't have to pay Boris' outrageous congestion charge (going up to £10 per day) and it does 60 MPG so overall I pay a fraction of the tax of some numpty driving some stupid Range Rover Sport.

Gary Williams

THX,

"I note nobody disagrees with me that even in the country you can reduce your fuel tax bill by driving a more fuel efficient vehicle."

Right, and no one would disagree if you were helpfully to declare that, if food were taxed, one could reduce one's food bill by not eating.
You like Pruises. Good for you; you must be proud of yourself. Many of us loathe them, and for having that sound opinion we should not be disproportionately penalised simply because of Government incompetence.

anthony

gordon brown gets chauffeured around in big heavy jaguars and range roves. firstly we pay for his car then his driver and lastly for the petrol that goes into his cars, so he does not need to worry about everytime he decides were that were not paying enough for petrol