The issue now – a shortage of drivers – is different to the 70s but ministers are wise to work on contingency plans
First it was stagflation. Then it was surging energy prices. Now the news that oil companies are rationing deliveries of petrol and diesel to garage forecourts has provided an ever louder echo of Britain in the 1970s.
By the standards of the past, the situation has not reached the crisis levels of 1973, when there was talk of motorists being forced to use petrol rationing coupons leftover from the second world war. Nor is the government facing a strike by tanker drivers, as was the case in early 1979 during the winter of discontent.
