Politics Tarred with an Oily Brush

After The Sun proclaims “Garages are Penny Pinchers” FREYA BERRY has a go at some satire of her own.

Asda dancing on ice david cameron garages Sainsbury's trident

Is the garages behaviour shocking or, is it just what everyone does to make money?

Gather round, children (not those of you whose parents are benefit cheats, though – you’ll have to stay in the corner enjoying the free milk you’ve somehow managed to cling onto). Those up in government have, finally, thrown us a fricking bone, man. George Osborne – the Chancellor, for those of you who have been otherwise occupied watching The Only Way is Essex – has, in the new budget, dropped the price of fuel duty by a whole penny a litre. If your petrol tank is, say, sixty litres then you save sixty whole pennies! Don’t go spending it all at once! That’s almost enough to buy a carton of 62p Sainsbury’s Basic apple juice (ambrosial nectar of the gods and Best. Hangover cure. Ever).

I was so totally excited at the prospect of actually saving some money for once, I cast aside the cardboard boxes I’d been using for warmth and started carving ‘Wills+Kate=Tru Luv’ onto the walls of the rubbish skip my brother now calls home, since child tax credits were cut. We are saving a penny a litre, people!

Except we’re not, because, as The Sun has kindly and subtly pointed out, the garages aren’t passing on the fuel duty cut. The penny drop has in general been only manifested as a 0.6p reduction, which means you only save 36p – definitely not enough for apple juice.

The problem with the cut is that it’s not enough for anyone to care about it or see it as a big benefit: it’s like focusing on a tiny, mouldering carrot while you’re being repeatedly thumped over the head with a stick. To be fair to the oil companies (not a phrase one hears very often), they have promised the cuts will be passed on within a week, but the garages will, cumulatively, cream off a fair amount of money by stealing away that 0.4p for that duration of time. The individual will never notice the small amount of money they save.

David Cameron tried to take a tough stance on the delay, saying ‘I want to see that passed on by garages. We have done what we can to cut taxes. It’s now right the market should respond. If it doesn’t, obviously there are proper ways…to make sure this market operates properly’. But it’s hard to support the man’s gesture of defiance towards big oil when he oversaw Lord Brown, ex-oil mogul and head of BP, reviewing whether students should stump up £9,000 a year for an education he himself had for free. And he’s just cut corporation tax by 2%. Everyone’s tarred with the oily brush of corporate power.

Most of us won’t have entered the world of child tax credits or even fuel duty as yet, but what we do feel is a political and media hype that create a flurry of hysterical number-chucking. I don’t know what £6 million means, but I do know it’s depressing watching everyone trying to screw over everyone else for money.  I don’t care if we cut funding to the arts by 15% and yet we’re thinking of renewing Trident at the cost of £3 billion a year. As I crawl disappointedly back to my box, the ruthlessness of the present environment makes me want to seriously D-I-S-E-N-G-A-G-E. Anyone?