First it was a mob of army wives in Portsmouth howling about perverts, but now with farmers and truckers organizing the fuel blockade, it becomes a serious, economic & social issue.
Farmers and truckers have actually been hopping mad for most of the decade, but they've now found an international tactic via the recent protests in France (an interesting detail worth an article in itself).
A couple of years ago, I went to observe a march by farmers and 'country folk', expecting to see a howling mob of foxhunters; they were there, but also I met some honest enough people on the edge of bankrupcy.. what they lacked was a perspective on their plight: too ready to lay blame on foregin imports or 'townies' (inc myself !) they were not easily persuaded that the problem lay with their own landowners, the aristocratic class, incidentally of whom Charles "Prince" Windsor is one of the worst culprits for charging high rents. In short, the people organizing the demo were in fact the ones causing the trouble, ultimately.
Returning to the fuel blockade, WE should be a little wary when the New Labour government is being attacked from the right wing: to them, Blair is a little Oxford leftie with all kinds of subversive deeds in his past: nonsense ? Sure, but this is the problem. Now he talks of sending troops in to break the blockade, (in a gross parody of when Labour broke the firemen's strike in 1977). Surely, it is up to us to formulate an approach whereby we can address the genuine needs of small farmers and farm workers (and also the truckers, who are often self employed, like shopkeepers) without endorsing the big conglomerates and established interests they still identify with.