Lewis proves more forgiving than M4 drivers
It’s hard to know where you stand with protesters these days. One lot are complaining about the price of petrol while others are jumping onto racetracks and demanding we stop using it altogether.
Demonstrations over high fuel prices are nothing new but so often seem a bit selfdefeating, as I’m not sure if I’ve yet seen a way of making such a protest that doesn’t involve spending more money on petrol.
While blockading refineries famously led to panic-buying, the latest tactic in the demand for a further fuel duty cut is to drive very slowly on motorways, something so many motorists have done with no cause to highlight. Every driver knows that crawling along is a highly inefficient way of using fuel, so it would surely teach the oil companies more of a lesson if everyone started driving at the optimum speed to minimise fuel use
- somewhere around
50mph, I believe, although still not ideal for a motorway.
At the other end of the spectrum are the protesters from Just
Stop Oil, who - the clue’s in the name don’t want petrol to be cheap or expensive.
Their stunt also involved winding up drivers, in a slightly more hazardous way, by invading the track during the British
Grand Prix. The race was briefly suspended, so they did manage to ‘stop oil’ for a few minutes.
Unlike those stuck behind the motorway convoys, the drivers didn’t seem too annoyed, or at least pretended not to be. Lewis Hamilton gushed: “I love that people are fighting for the planet, we need more like them”, before his Mercedes team waded in to assure people that Lewis also meant to say that jumping onto a racing circuit wasn’t big or clever. F1 president Stefano Domenicali was less complimentary, calling the protests “stupid and dangerous”.
Maybe it might be safer if they targeted slow-moving convoys on the M4 in future, although fuel duty protesters and motorists might be less forgiving than Lewis and Co.
The latest tactic in the demand for a further fuel duty cut is to drive very slowly on motorways, something so many have done with no cause to highlight