Every new excuse for State control is like every variant of Covid – more feeble than the last one

On and off yesterday, I kept dipping into MSM, contrarian news points and blogsites to try and get properly to grips with what exactly the cause(s) of Britain’s “petrol shortage” might be.

All of them sounded variously silly, counter-intuitive, contrived or unfathomable: a mass exodus of migrant drivers, sudden retirement plans among the HGV class, ‘there’s long been a shortage of drivers’, post Covid oil shortages, Covid bleeping HGV drivers and – of course – Brexit. As usual, Granite Schnapps is hiding behind the sofa, but his 2iC at Transport let the cat out of the bag when he said yesterday, “There are queues at petrol stations because people think there’s a petrol shortage, but there isn’t”.

The media had, in one form or another, added a generous dollop of ‘shock-horror-panic’…