The best selling book in galactic history famously sold so well because it had on it's covers in large friendly letters, the phrase "Don't Panic". It seems seems paradigmatic that the Tories should choose the opposite as their current strategy, even in the absence of any known threat, their current message is not just 'Panic Now', but a more nuanced "Get your panic in early".
There seems to be a belief that if we all panic buy our fuel and make the pumps run dry this week we'll all be fine next week, when, if there is a strike, the petrol stations will have difficulty re-fuelling. Essentially the government think that a week or more of disruption is more desirable than a single day of striking, which would likely effect only a handful of forecourts. It's not usually the role of the Cuntservatives to highlight the essential contribution made by a striking sector, but it does appear they're hellbent on emphasising the efficacy of their action, and the necessity of their role.
The delivery industry has been quick to point out that all their drivers are currently mobilised trying to make up for the unexpected shortages following Francis Maude's realisation that he had shares in the jerry can industry. Strangley then the strikers are being painted the heroes of the hour just before the Tories are due to rush out the "tanker drivers are bigger wreckers than nurses" statement they've been drafting all week. While it is nice of the Cabinet to arrange a few days of overtime for tanker drivers so they can afford to lose a day's pay next week, I wonder if we're going to see Tory scaremongers made to compensate those who can't get to work today or tomorrow?
The threatened strike underlines however the position of the Tory party to industrial relations and their desire to drag us back to the 1930's. The strike is essentially one about health and safety - now i'm not sure about you but i want the guys who drive hundred of gallons of highly flammable material down our highways to be awake at the wheel, and while it's annoying when you pull up to a garage and see the the tanker there and entry to the forecourt blocked by little plastic cones i don't think that it being blocked by the screaming bodies of burning employees would be any real improvement. Yet repeatedly it is the great successes that unions have had over the years in securing safe and reasonable working practices that the Conservatives are now trying to erode. Which makes Fanny Maude's statement to fill jerry cans absolutely fine. Fill a dozen, pop them in your car (despite the dubious legality of that), drive home in the fumes and then stack them in your shed full of wood, old paint and dodgy wiring. What could possibly go wrong.
It's not as though the Tories don't know how to organise a fuel crisis properly, Iain Duncan Smith, Edgar Griffin and their mates in the BNP did a great job in organising a fuel stoppage ten years ago and the Blue Team were right behind them, but they were different times. Labour times. Now it's no longer politically expedient to allow the fuel industry to have the right to stoke, especially when one might have lost one's media sponsors, but it is convenient to just put the disaster forward a few days and distract everyone from what is in the papers. Don't panic buy petrol and fill your garage with jerry cans. Put it straight in the milk bottles so you've got them ready, come the glorious day. Which on current reckoning will be Thursday week.
And while this incompetence is all great fun, the hilarity and difficulties of the conveniently created fuel panic, hasn't made me forget Cash for Cameron. "Don't Panic" said the Hitch Hiker's Guide, and if we kept calm and carried on, we discovered that at the end of the books the whole of government was an elaborate smokescreen to distract the populace from the fact that the same old shadowy vested interests were still pulling the strings. While the Prime Minister pimps himself out and hopes that shouting "quick everybody look over there" will cover his modesty, one has to wonder were the fiction begins.
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