If looked as if Alistair Darling were stuck on a groove on his Sky News interview. Michael Howard was famously asked the same question 13 times – Darling seemed to give the same answer as many times. I suspect his message was programmed by No10 because it has Brown’s fingerprints all over it. Here’s that message – repeated ad nauseum.
“People are feeling the pressures, but it is driven by the fact that food world prices are up by 40% and oil has doubled in the last year. That’s feeding through. The key is we take action to reduce these oil prices and get lower prices at the pump, lower prices at the supermarket.”
There are three elephants in the room, trampling on his argument:
1. We’re paying more because of the Black Wednesday-style slide in sterling since Brown came to power – our currency plunged by 15% to 20% against most others (bar the dollar). See here. This means oil prices are about 20% higher for us then for the Eurozone, ditto imported food. As the Bank of England put it in their May inflation report: “Price inflation of imported goods rose to its highest since 1995, in part reflecting the substantial depreciation of sterling… A key factor behind the rise in import prices has been sterling’s 12% depreciation since July 2007.” Can Brown blame this on America?
2. Petrol hikes are far more painful in
| EU country | Growth in petrol prices, between May 07 and May 08 |
| Estonia | 28% |
| UK | 17.4% |
| Austria | 15.2% |
| Latvia | 13.8% |
| Greece | 13.5% |
| Ireland | 12.6% |
| Italy | 12.2% |
| Sweden | 11.6% |
| Lithuania | 11.4% |
| Portugal | 11.4% |
| Finland | 11.2% |
| Norway | 10.8% |
| Belgium | 10.6% |
| Switzerland | 9.2% |
| France | 8.4% |
| Netherlands | 7.9% |
3. Brown can cut petrol at a stroke as 60% of the pump price is pure tax. It is the height of hypocrisy for Brown to coining in from the extra money from motorists and at the same say “I feel your pain, I’ll have a word with Soddy Arabia”.
If I were “the King of Soddy Arabia”, as Brown called him at his presser last Thursday, I’d say, when they meet next week: “Look, don’t point the finger at the Arab world for your inability to control the value of your own currency. If you want petrol prices to fall, how about taxing your people less at the pumps? You can do it in a stroke. Petrol prices are high in Britain because you make them so. Don’t blame us.”
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