This Country's Trucked

Britain’s road haulage industry is planning to bring traffic to a grinding halt in London today, to protest at rising fuel costs.

“We’d like to say we’re speaking up for every hard-hit motorist in the country,” said leading trucker Wayne Crowbar. “We aren’t, of course - because as usual we’re motivated purely by our own selfish greed - but it’s nice to think that all those silly sods who read the tabloids are behind us. And not just in 20-mile tailbacks, either.”

According to a tear-stained fax we received from Transaction 2007, who are helping to organise the protest, hundreds of loyal British hauliers are going out of business because wicked, scheming foreigners can buy their fuel at rock-bottom prices on the continent - where it is of course completely untaxed, and also strangely unavailable to UK-based companies.

“Our long campaign to utterly destroy the railfreight industry - which began in the fifties and has been enthusiastically assisted by every Transport Secretary ever since, apart from that villain Shirley Williams, who stupidly stopped Dr Beeching from completely wrecking the railways – is all but complete, and we thought we had everything nicely stitched up“ - sorry - “sewn up,” said the press release. “Now we’ve discovered to our utter amazement that using 20 lorries to carry the same tonnage as one train uses quite a bit of fuel. All we want is a gigantic bung from the taxpayer. If we don’t get it, you’ll just end up paying for it indirectly at the supermarkets - but at least our way you won’t notice it so much.”

Meanwhile, Eddie Stobart fans from all over the country with nothing better to occupy their lives were converging on London for an orgy of truck-spotting, and mayor Boris Johnson was gleefully planning ways to spend the unexpected windfall in congestion charges from hundreds of 18-wheelers converging on Downing Street to demand a rebate just for themselves.