Northampton Commentary 5th April 2012
My website shows a variety of Letters I’ve sent to the press over the last week or so, most of them via Nick many of them have already appeared in the Local Press. Please note the variety of topics, one of which is the ‘FairFuel Campaign’ .
Dear FairFuelUK Supporter
Petrol and diesel have dominated the news headlines over the last few days. This email update is to let you know our take on the situation and to ask you for a little help.
- The real ‘fuel crisis’ is not the current particular dispute between the tanker drivers and their employers. Important as it is to see this dispute resolved fairly and quickly, the real ‘fuel crisis’ is the scandalously high price that families and businesses are having to pay for petrol & diesel. This will be made worse by the fact that the Government waived through in the Budget another 16p a gallon in fuel taxes to hit us all this summer.
- The reaction to the possible disruption to fuel supplies has surely showed the Government one thing …. PETROL & DIESEL ARE ABSOLUTELY VITAL TO FAMILIES, BUSINESSES AND THE ENTIRE ECONOMY. Our argument is that forcing up prices by increasing fuel duty is hurting families, damaging business and holding back growth. All our polling shows that fuel tax is the nation’s number 1 priority and recent figures have showed that Britain’s economy is hardly growing at all. The Government is investing hundreds of millions of pounds in ‘job creation’ to fight unemployment. As well as truly understanding the suffering that high petrol & diesel prices are causing, they need to listen to our research which clearly shows that CUTTING FUEL DUTY is the most effective way of creating jobs and boosting growth. If you have not done so already, please see the evidence at http://fairfueluk.com/cebr.html
Some people have asked why FairFuelUK doesn’t support the idea of hauliers and farmers ‘blockading’ refineries and stopping the flow of fuel to protest about high prices. Please go to this link for a review of the Campaign's position.
Over the next few weeks, we will be fighting in Parliament to see the 16p a gallon increase, waived through in the Budget speech, scrapped and to make the Government see that it should be cutting fuel duty, not raising it!
We need your help to give us the power to make the politicians listen. We are fortunate to be supported by the RAC, the Road Haulage Association, the Freight Transport Association and The Fuelcard Company. On top of that, we have over 235,000 individual supporters like you. That figure of 235,000 is impressive – but it needs to be so much higher! This is where we need your help. There are 30 million motorists in the country. We need to spread the word to those millions of potential supporters that they don’t need to go and ‘blockade’. What they need to do is sign up to www.fairfueluk.com so that the Government realise they are facing a massive and growing movement of public opinion.
Please, as a matter of urgency do these three simple things:
1. Please ask everyone you know to sign up to www.fairfueluk.com – every extra signup (it’s free and only takes a few seconds) really does make our argument more powerful. There’s a simple copy and paste email below that you can send to your address book.
2. Help us spread word of the campaign by a powerful showing of our ‘CUT FUEL DUTY NOW’ sticker campaign. You can order them here http://fairfueluk.com/sticker___donations.html
3. Please post your experiences and comments on our blog at http://fairfueluk.com/quentins_blog.php so that we can see how the price of petrol & diesel are affecting you.
We had some success last year defeating over 9p per litre of rises in fuel duty. We were hugely disappointed that the chancellor ignored our calls in the recent Budget but with your help and support, the fight goes on!
Kind regards,
The FairFuelUK Team
You will also know that I am in a long running battle to try to save the livings of the Boston Fishermen. I’ve just picked this up from Nigel Farage’s office, yet another self-appointed, big business orientated, body interfering in one of our traditional industries.
Marine Stewardship Council?
The pronouncements of the "Marine Stewardship-Council" (MSC) are frequently quoted by EU-agencies as "independent evidence" of the wisdom and benevolence of the EU's (utterly disastrous) fishing-policy; but what is the MSC?
The MSC was founded in 1997 by (a) the "World Wide Fund For Nature" (WWF) and (b) Unilever plc/nv - see:
(a) The founders of the WWF, included (1) Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who also founded the "Bilderberg-meeting" (a recruiting-ground for the Council on Foreign Relations of New York, which exerts political influence on behalf of several hundreds of the world's largest corporations) and (2) Godfrey A. Rockefeller, scion of the family, which owns several of the USA's Federal Reserve-Banks, and which founded and leads the Council on Foreign Relations of New York (CFR) The CFR was instrumental in setting up the United Nations Organisation and the European Economic Community (forerunner of the EU)
(b) Unilever is one of the world's largest corporations and a member of the CFR. It is also an "economic partner" of the EU-Commission and a leading proponent of the EU's legislation on replacing fossil-fuels with "bio-fuels", mainly palm-oil, whose consequent over-cultivation has led to widespread deforestation and food-shortages in poor countries. Unilever is also one of the world's largest producers of palm-oil.
It would appear, therefore, that MSC represents big business, at its most intrusive and exploitative, and political structures, at their most anti-democratic and presumptuous. The EU's quoting MSC as an authority is thus like quoting, as authorities, its own agencies and backers
Derek Clark MEP Northampton 5th April 2012
