So far Gordon Brown and his Government do not appear to be grasping the serious implications that the increasing cost of fuel is having on people all over the country, especially in rural areas where people are suffering a double whammy from petrol and heating oil inflation. And this failure to grasp the severity for us has its own serious implications for Gordon Brown.

So far the Government is not even prepared to scrap the proposal to increase fuel duty by 2p a litre later this year, despite the growing feeling that they will have no choice but to do so in the end. As George Osborne put it today, they are going to have to perform a u-turn in the end so why not get on with it?

Yesterday Gordon Brown went to Scotland to ask North Sea Oil producers what they could do to help and he was pleased to announce that a few thousand extra barrells of oil will be extracted from the North Sea Fields. But we are talking tens of thousands of additional barrells against a daily global oil consumption of more than 80 million barrels. The reality is that this move will make an inperceptable difference to the price we pay at petrol pumps. In any event, over 70% of the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump is tax so it is a little rich for Brown to be suggesting that the industry must bring the price down. The recent price rises have caused a windfall of tax revenues for the Government that they had not expected and Brown would do well to think about giving some of this back.

At the same time, Gordon Brown seemed to suggest that his other solution to the rise in gas and oil prices was to build even more nuclear power stations. Now I am not against the building of more nuclear power stations; whilst they are not a perfect answer to the global energy crisis, they are the only realistic option that we have at the moment to make a serious reduction in our carbon emissions from power generation. My point is simply that I am not sure how building nuclear plower stations, even if that would not take years if not decades, in any way reduces the price I am paying for diesel. Oil is globally traded and we have relatively few oil fired power stations so that a reduction in demand for oil from our power generators is unlilkely to have even as much of an effect on pump prices as producing a few thousand more barells of the stuff would.

If Gordon Brown really wants to help those who rely on their cars, those who have no choice but to heat their home by oil and those businesses whose distribution costs are spiralling out of control, he ought to stop tweaking the edges and tackle the one thing that would really make a difference, fuel duty.