David Vance SubstackRead More
I had to fill my car up with petrol today and after a bit of scouting around, managed to find pumps that only charged me £1.30/litre. Now that is quite good in the area in which I live as others are charging as much as £1.39/litre. However it’s still 10p/litre more than I paid the last time I filled up, which was BEFORE the US-Israel conflict with the Mad Mullahs.
Like everyone else, I am not happy about it but if that’s the small extra price I pay to help 90 million Iranians get freedom, so be it.
However, I was incandescent with rage when I heard Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband lecturing Petrol Retailers and Wholesalers about the prices that they are charging and how they would not tolerate motorists being ripped off. This ignores that fact that the greatest rip off is by the GOVERNMENT.
You see here in the UK, more than half of what we pay for petrol is tax and goes straight into the Government coffers. There are two main charges: fuel duty and VAT. Fuel duty is a fixed amount per litre – currently 52.95p – added to every litre of fuel, no matter what the base price. Then VAT at 20% is charged on top of both the fuel and the duty. So, if petrol costs about 145p per litre, roughly 53p is fuel duty and about 24p is VAT. That means around 77p of the price – just over half – goes straight to the government.
If Reeves actually wanted to help us – and she doesn’t – she could lift VAT or cut DUTY even if that was only on a temporary basis to help us.
But she has no intention of doing either.
In fact, she still suggests that she may increase Fuel Duty by a further 5p/litre on 1st September!
I have a friend who owns a few petrol stations and I have long known his profit margins. They are razor sharp, a few pence per litre. The Big Supermarket forecourts make a bit more, around 10p/litre. However they are not “price gouging” as Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband imply, because what we pay is directly linked to the Brent Crude price. Here’s how it has performed last two weeks;
This is why we pay more, and you might think our Chancellor of the Exchequer would grasp this. The price WILL drop but in the interim, there is nothing to stop her giving use a little insulation from this energy spike. But to do that, she would need to care.
She doesn’t. The Government doesn’t.
In fact all this is a help towards the stated aim to ban ALL petrol/diesel cars by 2035.
