Being Seen to Do Something

 

Faced with a mounting level of protests about rising fuel prices, Gordon Brown presents us with his version of Being Seen to Do Something. 

First, there's calling in a meeting of representatives from the North Sea oil industry, lined up and presented to us in an all too obviously staged-for-the-cameras opening speech, with Gordon Brown doing his improved but less than convincing I-have-now-been-trained-to-smile-while-speaking-like-an-automaton presentation style. 

Out of this comes the key announcement, said to show that the government is "listening" to the public's crushing  mid-term election votes against it, that they have now asked the oil producers to up North Sea oil production by 70,000 barrels per day. 

Sounds substantial? It seems UK oil consumption in 2007 was 1,800,000 barrels per day. So that's an increase of, er, 3.9%. And it could well add to the cost of the oil the users pay, because it will cost more to produce than oil from oilfields which aren't as much in decline as the North Sea oilfields, and the North Sea producers are hardly likely to absorb the extra cost of churning out more of their declining asset.

In any case, it seems that, although the recent rises in oil prices are huge, the actual cost to us as users is nothing like as high as it was thirty years ago, once you allow for inflation.