22nd January 2015

In the early 1970's I recall driving out as a family, the indoor critic, myself and our one year old daughter.

I was low on fuel and so I called into the first filling station that we came across.

The price of a gallon of petrol, on which our Citroen Dyane would run for some sixty miles, was around 35 pence.

I remember being shocked at the price.

I filled the tank with petrol, the cost was under £2 00, and when I returned to the car I announced, 'That's it, when petrol gets to 50 pence a gallon I am selling the car and giving up driving'.

Of course I didn't, I couldn't, I needed the car for my work as a Curate in the Church of England, I had a young family our second daughter was born and my life and work style was built around the flexibility of the family car.

It was also in the winter of 1974, January through to March, that we endured three day weeks, with routine power cuts. 

I managed to fix up an old car headlamp from the local scrapyard attached to a car battery which meant that with oil fired heating and temporary lighting we were still warm and we could see to read.

We couldn't however cook on our electric cooker and had to use a camping stove.

With the cost of crude oil and gas rising and with the increased militancy of the Miners Union it must have become clear to someone that action was needed.

And action was taken by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher.

Our energy dependency was exported and the advent of first Gas and then Oil in the North Sea was used to first undermine and then close down our coal industry.

The receipts from the North Sea were then used to underwrite the economy creating a false sense of national well being and ensuring that the balance of payments balanced on a day to day, month to month, year to year, hand to mouth basis.

Meanwhile in Norway .......

Or as the SNP might have it, 'we was robbed'.

Now, as if some great Machiavellian hand is at work in the affairs of the British State Oil prices are falling, the North Sea Oil Fields are not producing because it is not economic to do so, and on the supermarket forecourt prices are being reduced and the rate of reduction is almost 2 pence a week and occasionally 2 pence a day.

The price is still over 50 pence a gallon, even £1 11 99 is close enough to £6 00 a gallon making people feel much better off than when it was nearer £8 00 a gallon but it is still impacting on family budgets.

And of course the Chancellor is smiling, our plan he says, is working, except that of course there is no plan at all, but he senses that people will feel sufficient easing of the financial constraint imposed by austerity to give him and his colleagues another five years and perhaps this time without being hampered by con-demnation.

As Oxfam has reminded us whilst the 1% gather at Davos that the 1% have now garnered into their barns as much of the wealth as the other 99%.

Croesus must be looking down from the Pantheon and worrying that soon he will not be the very definition of Wealth.

The Managing Director of the IMF is worried that Marx might yet be proved to be right and that Capitalism is harbouring the seeds of its own destruction and Picketty and the authors of The Spirit Level stand back and watch ..... and wait for their warnings to be heard, reprinted and republished.

This is no way to run our affairs as a nation in the year of our Lord 2015.

As the Archbishop commented recently, quoting William Temple a former Archbishop of both York and Canterbury, “The art of government in fact, is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands.”

There is a consistent theme that emerges whenever thoughtful people reflect on inequality which is that more equal societies are happier, more at ease with themselves, more  productive and ultimately richer and more successful than unequal societies.

Tragically it remains a lesson that Conservative Governments consistently fail to learn.

In 1972/73 my Stipend was £900 and my housing was provided and petrol was 35 pence a Gallon, forty three years and a couple of O's later and little has changed, there is still more month than money when pay day comes round and I'm still considering giving up Motoring perhaps when petrol reaches £50 a gallon?