As fuel protests grow, how can the government tackle a summer of discontent?

Fairly or not, such a mood of decay and national malaise is bound to reflect badly on the governing party, writes Sean O’Grady

Drivers angry over fuel prices hold a ‘go-slow’ protest on the A64 in Yorkshire (Getty)

Motorway go-slows earlier this week, organised by the awkwardly named Fuel Price Stand Against Tax, didn’t have much of an immediate effect – the price of a litre remains stubbornly high – but they did prove one important point: even the most draconian laws, and the most agitated of home secretaries (Priti Patel), are powerless in the face of mass protest on this scale.

Police have a groaning buffet of measures to choose from under the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, as well as other repressive powers passed under New Labour and Conservative administrations over the past quarter-century. They have CCTV and ANPR on an unprecedented scale, and even some new recruits. But if thousands of van, car and HGV drivers really want to clog the M4, they will. If they are all given fines and subsequently choose to go to court, the judicial system will collapse. It was just such a show of mass disobedience that crippled the poll tax in 1990.

With no sign of the prices of petrol and diesel subsiding, and little indication yet of a Treasury cave-in, these protests – which, broadly speaking, are unlawful – are bound to grow. History suggests they have a high chance of eventual success. The fuel protests of 2000, for example, involved rolling road blocks and blockades outside oil refineries, and caused mass panic in the country – and, more to the point, in Tony Blair’s cabinet. Most alarmingly, Labour fell behind the Tories in the opinion polls for the first time in more than a decade.