The price is…how much?

If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment

There are a few things that mark one out as a proper grown-up. Utterances that make you realise that the age of innocence is over, and the cold hard reality of getting through life is yours. One of these is if your first thought on seeing snow is not ‘Do you want to build a snowman’, but ‘Oh crap. How am I going to get to work tomorrow’.  Another – admittedly only really applicable to grown-ups who drive something with an internal combustion engine rather than an electric motor – is the looking at and comparing of prices displayed at the petrol station. I really can’t believe I am alone in this.

My second thought on hearing the news of the current conflict in the Middle East, after – this is probably not going to end well or quickly – was ‘just how much will energy prices go up now?’. Selfish? Yes probably. But, I’d like to think, realistic.

Two weeks ago I noticed that I could drive the 17 miles from my office to my house and see the price of a litre of unleaded drop by around 6p, and a further 7p none miles further where my mother lives. That’s a jump of £7.80 to fill up my tank depending where I do it. And that was before the conflict. I looked at the prices near the office today, and there’s now a £25 difference in the cost of filling up my tank between the cheapest and the most expensive petrol station. And that’s not even looking at the ones on the motorway.

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said that she plans to meet with petrol retailers this week, because “this government will not tolerate price gouging”. Too late, Madame Chancellor, gouging is alive and well.

Yesterday (Monday) saw a spike in the cost of oil, pushing it up by the highest amount in a single day in six years. It does seem a bit like a first-world-problem, when you consider there are bombs raining down all over the Middle East. However, we live in an oil-centric world. Anything and everything that affects the price and availability of petrol has a knock-on effect on the cost of everything. It fuels inflation. Even the OBR reckons we will be looking at inflation of 3%by the end of the year, rather than the current 2% forecast, should energy prices stay as they are.

Reeves said today that stability is the most important thing in reducing interest rates inflation and the cost of living, and that regaining stability is her ‘top priority’. Good luck with that.

There is pressure to  put off the planned increase in fuel duty in September. It would be the first such rise in 15 years, which rather begs the question, should it be scrapped completely rather than postponed again. I’ve always thought of fuel duty as a rather dirty money-grubbing tax : “We’re going to tax this because we can. Oh, and we’re then going to charge you VAT on top of that. A tax on the tax. Paid for with money you’ve already paid tax on.” Death and taxes, the only things we really can’t avoid.

In my many, many trips round the sun, I’ve seen my share of recessions, downturns and their subsequent upturns. This one though seems different. It seems longer and, thus far, without any hints of green shoots. I really, really don’t want to be one of those media commentators talking things down, because I think there are good chances that things will get better. They have to. It’s just that the last week or so has made that much more difficult.