It's things like this which help discourage me from learning to drive, I get hard up on cash as it is on occasions. I agree that the public transport services should be improved, but with the idiots in charge now, I can't really see that happening anytime soon
(Okay, so the above links may be a little bit old, but the situation continues on. And it is only local for me, I can't say as to the rest of the UK)
but by altering the supply they do in effect, affect the priceOriginally Posted by beanbandit
Typed a good long response before I realised I was talking rubbish... take two:
I have to agree with you there, people are always going to want petrol until there is simply none available at all (same with oil). Only then are people going to start really searching for alternatives ('If it ain't broke, don't fix it' mayhaps?). Until then, as the supply shortens (by whatever means), people will be willing to pay more and more for that product, so the providers will increase their prices as they see fit.
Never been to Libya, but my dad can fill his Toyota pickup (big brute of a thing) in Angola for £18
Egypt is about £1 a litre.... thats Egyptian pounds though, so about 10p a litre (or it ws a couple of years ago anyway)
But before the angry "rib off Britain/Europe" replies start again, there is significantly higher manufacturing and distribution costs over here. And it is a visious cycle too, when the costs of manufacturing petrol/diesel goes up that means the fost of running the refineries and storage depots goes up, when then pushes the manufacturin costs up a bit more, and on and on.
We also have a little thing called "health and safety" and things along those lines
That's all well and good, but you wouldn't want to fly your car over there just to fill it up cheaply would you
That is perfectly true, but we had a very effective barrier to price rises before our dear Chancellor saw fit to force prices over the psychologically significant £1 per litre level.
None of the companies wanted to be the ones to push prices over that but Alistair Darling pushed them all over at one stroke by ripping us off for an extra few pence a litre.
Once that had been breached the brakes were off. It has gone up about 5p per litre around here just in the last month or two. It'll be 110p before the next month is out. I have no doubt about that at all.
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Crazy prices, that will keep going up and up i'm sure - and it IS partially the fault of our government. You can still find fuel for under £1 a litre though - I (unfortunately) have to travel in to stoke/stafford a few times a week, and theres a couple of stations there which are usually at 99p a litre still!
You can't just look at the 'immediate' taxes placed on petrol such as duty and VAT - these are important yes, but don't tell the whole story. One of the biggest costs with fuel is (ironically imo) transportation, and as we (hopefully) all know fuel is generally not transported around on 1.1litre 60mpg cars..is transported in huge tankers which themselves pump out a large amount of CO2/carbon. Whats happened in the past few years? The governement has put a load of extra taxes on this class of vehicle, increasing transportation costs by a large proportion.
So when you take into account the whole picture (you can take it further too if you start looking at how the fuel gets here in the first place, or if you look at operating costs of the uk refineries and how they are taxed) you really can put some of the blame on them. Oh and ofc theres the fact that our government decided to charge head first into the middle east behind go...george bush, contributing to a massive jump in oil prices (not to mention terrorism on a mass scale [sorry, supposed to call it 'liberation' are we not?]).
Having had my daily go at the government though, I'm not stupid enough to think its solely their fault - the oil companies themselves are putting the prices up, and thats just good business sense. Regardless of the actual supplies out there, people imagine that we're almost out of oil and therefore expect (and generally put up with) the higher prices.
Anyway my point was that it IS partly due to the government that the price has gone up, and they COULD do all sorts of things about it. They won't though - would reduce their income (we'd just get taxed another way anyway) plus it would make them look bad from a green angle, which is their "big thing" at the moment.
Until ALL MPs drive round in electric/hybrid cars they can never be seen as green in my eyes.
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You got it spot on, OPEC can effect the price, but they cannot set the price. But at the moment the cost of oil is going to keep souring up. There's not a lot that we can do about it.
Alistair Darling has yet to do his first Budget (this afternoon) it was his predecessor who put the 2p on fuel. Plus if rumours are to be believed, we will be facing another 2p increase in 6 months time instead of 6pm tonight.
I'm off to service my bicycle
2p delayed for six months - but it ought to have been cancelled altogether given the 20p rise in the past year.
Apparently darling lives in lah-lah-land because inflation was under 2%..
In which country?
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Whaaaaa...?I'm off to service my bicycle
Again i'm not sure where people are getting their figures from. Petrol has gone up by about 10p over the last two years or so, i remember filling up at 98.9p litre 2 years ago, its now at 103.9. Diesel prices may be more than that. But its not 20p.
no no no, not that sort of servicing
2p, you mean? In October 2007, the previous rises being 1.25p in December 2006, 1.28p in October 2003 and a 2p DROP in March 2001 (with a further 1p drop in October 2000, when the Ultra Low Sulphur Petrol category was introduced, which any petrol one buys now is).
Hybrid cars arn't fuel efficient, i get the same millage from my car as a toyota prius does yet i have to pay £205 (pre budget) a year to pay road tax. Why?
And as for electric cars, where do they get the electricity from..............coal fired power stations mabee.
All petrol prices are doing is tryng to force people off the road, and when it's to expencive for people to drive to work, they won't work.
1 guy at my work pays £200 a month on petrol just to and from work, and theres no way he takes home any more than 1k a month.
With the exeption of supercars and 4x4s they should leave prices well alone untill the only real alternatice to petrol is available, thats the hydrogen fuel cells due in the next 5 years somtime.
Polititions are just looking for more and more ways to screw you over, and when every bodys driving round in hydrogen cars, they'll change it to screw us over then too.
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"Petrol
106.3 p/litre
Diesel
113.1 p/litre" Today's average Fuel Price reports AA (Fuel Price Reports : AA monthly fuel price report for February 2008 - The AA)
The AA's Jan 2007 puts petrol at 85.8p.. ~20p doesn't seem unreasonable as a statement.
And remember I live in East Anglia - which means I pay considerably more than that at the pump for some daft reason - lack of hills? Can you post me 50litres of 103.9 - that's a bloody bargain!
Crosshair VIII Hero (WIFI), 3900x, 32GB DDR4, Many SSDs, EVGA FTW3 3090, Ethoo 719
You think your hard done by. Round here the cheapest places (usually supermarkets) fuel is 108.9!
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