Money doesn't grow on trees... stop taking ours
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THE REAL PROBLEM of the industry is not the ever increasing fuel tax burden, but rather its inability to recover the extra cost from its customers. It might well be said that the inability of the logistics industry to recover the extra cost, with the attendant inflation that would bring, encourages and emboldens the Treasury to squeeze all the more, knowing that it can do so with impunity.
If the logistics industry were more able to recover extra taxation through its revenue, the government of the day would pay an immediate penalty. The increase would quickly feed into inflation and the public would see it, so that penalty would be political as well as an economic.
If that happened, sucessive Chancellors would be wary of doing it again.
One wonders what the reaction would be if the Road Haulage Association (RHA) retorted that hauliers would put up their prices and shoppers would pay. That would be very damaging to the government of the day and a good deterrent to greedy Chancellors in future. Of course, we cannot forget that hauliers have to survive this year before worrying about the next but, in the medium term, the industry has to see the link between fuel taxes and shop prices firmly established in the public mind.