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“Where were they [the hauliers that is] during the miners’ strike?” He looked at me nonplussed And I realised that he didn’t remember the miners’ strike In fact, he probably didn’t remember the miners at all. He wasn’t aware that a few hundred truckers and tanker drivers had achieved within a week what the British labour movement failed to achieve in more than a year between 1984 and 1985.Later that night the weird stupidity of the stock-piling and the strange and rather lovely emptiness of many roads were compounded by polls showing that the public supported the protesters absolutely overwhelmingly.No matter what gloss one tried to put on the figures it was clear that – as long as the protest didn’t kill anyone – the voters of Britain were in favour of action to bring down fuel prices. The last time I felt quite so wrong-footed by my fellow countrymen and women was when Diana, Princess of Wales died.Given my own surprise, I can hardly criticise the Government for not predicting the speed of the collapse Yesterday Tony Blair seemed genuinely bemused It was all so illogical. Farmers wanted simultaneously (he pointed out) to receive more subsidy and to cut taxes. And the hauliers have been given loads of little concessions by the generous Mr Brown in recent months.Unsurprisingly, the Government has found itself more or less friendless. Some critics on the left have consoled themselves with the thought that this blockade was – at least – collective action, and thus likely to be radicalising; tell that to the Nazi Sturmabteilung and the Rwandan Interahamwe. Others have detected a conspiracy of oil companies behind the blockade.

Still more have said that the problem is down to the switch from direct taxes (honest) to indirect ones (sneaky and stealthy).But it’s hard to square any of this with the nature of the support received by the truckers One bloke in a car said it all. “They’re fighting,” he told cameras, “for everyone who has a vehicle on the road.” Not me, of course. I don’t change into a mechanised centaur, half-man, half-car (the bottom half the man, and the top half the car), every time I step into my Toyota. But the motorist component of most people has been outraged by the sudden and unjustifiable increase in petrol and diesel prices.Ah, say Charlie Kennedy and Friends of the Earth, the problem is that the Government hasn’t won people over by explaining to them the benefits to the environment of higher petrol prices. If the Government had taken the lead a bit more, all would have been well Yet this doesn’t stack up either.

The Government simply does not command public opinion in that way, as FoE – victors over Tony Blair on GM foods and themselves experts at direct action – must have realised. If the case for action in the face of global warming has not been made, one is entitled to ask where FoE have been for the last three years. In the fields digging up innocuous GM oilseed rape, that’s where.Ooh, adds Transport 2000, if the billions received from oil revenues had been spent on public transport, then there wouldn’t be an outcry among car drivers about fuel prices Unfortunately this is nonsense as well. And not just because it takes a long time to build new rail links and tram systems. The hard fact is that cars are door-to-door convenient and – once you’ve bought one, taxed and insured it – almost bound to be more economic than using public transport There are indeed buses in the countryside: no one uses them. If you want to reduce car use then you have – in some way – to penalise driving. There is no pain-free method.The Tories have understood this, and decided to junk the whole car-limiting business.