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Forget the silver Lining
Page 3
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"There are bad times just around the corner, there are dark clouds hurtling through the sky" wrote Noel Coward, and how right he was. The price of diesel is going up, as we all expected it would. Having enjoyed El per litre parity at the pumps, it was only a matter of time before prices started creeping up again. Should we be surprised? Not really. The world's oil producers were only going to feel uncomfortable torso long in the face of howls of pretest from nonproducers. And anyway, someone's got to pay for those gold taps and Rolls-Royces.
The best we can hope for is that any price increase is gradual rather than seismic. It's hard enough to get a fueL surcharge, but even worse when you're forever chasing the price of diesel upwards. You want ANOTHER surcharge...? Hell's teeth, you only had one last week!'
Meanwhile, there's a home-grown dark cloud hurtling towards us in the shape of the chancellor's 1.84p per litre increase in duty planned for 1 April. The irony of it happening on April Fool's day won't have escaped the average Commercial Motor reacer, but this has to be some kind of joke. And as the two trade associations start cranking up their respective PR machines, at CM we remain convinced that a single trade association, with a single cohesive lobbying voice, would be much better — especially when it comes to arguing for an Essential User Rebate. Can anyone
say different? Moreover, all those larger operators
who apply their own fuel surcharge, then decline to pay it to smaller subcontractors, need to realise that their all-for-one and none-for-all approach is at the heart of what's wrong in this industry. Solidarity isn't just for Polish shipyards. And until Britain's truck operators can all speak, but above all else, act as one, The Master's words seem depressingly prophetic: -We're going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag and wait until we drop down dead..." Brian Weatherley