(Picture: Shobba: Truck and Driver Dec 2000) The sight of queues at petrol stations in September 2021 takes me back to September 2000 and the big fuel crisis.  It’s the same basic set-up. There’s no shortage of fuel being churned out by the refineries. It just can’t get into the service stations quick enough. The big difference is that in 2021 panic buying seems to have made what would have been a difficult situation much worse. There aren’t enough tanker drivers to supply all the petrol stations. But it wasn’t until news got out about the delivery problem that people started panic buying.  In 2000, the tanker drivers couldn’t even get out of the terminals because they were being blocked by farmers  lorry and taxi drivers protesting about fuel taxes. It always sticks in my mind because I’d bee...

 I saw some chat recently on the Any Answers section of AccountingWeb about the way different sections of HM Revenue and Customs responded to the Agent’s Authorisation form. One agent was upset because staff had refused to talk to them on the phone about their clients. The reason was that they didn’t have a 64-8 paper authorisation. They had an online authorisation in place, but HMRC said it only authorised them to file online . “Is it Ok that HMRC staff are told to lie?” one of them demanded. You can see it here  https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/is-it-ok-that-hmrc-staff-are-told-to-lie I can get how frustrating it is. I can get how perverse it seems. But HMRC will not have told staff to lie. As I said here , don’t think of HMRC as one unit – it’s more like a bunch of villages. And at the moment, the villagers keep moving from house to house as the work moves around. And when we were talking about emailher e, I made the point that each village has its own rules an...

  I was a bit stunned by reports of Priti Patel’s latest brainwave – to rewrite maritime law so that Border Force cutters can ‘pushback’ migrant boats, “when deemed practical and safe to do so”.   Stunned that she would try it, and stunned that it was being reported on the BBC website as changing the law to “allow” the Border Force to push back, as if it was something the officers on the vessels were anxious to do.  This could just be an aftershock from June when the Daily Mail headlined a story saying that Border Force cutters had entered French waters to pick up migrants. The Mail said it had a recording of a radio conversation between the Border Force and a French ship asking permission to cross into their territory and rescue the group (instead of waiting for the dinghy to drift into British waters). People smugglers cynically put immigrants in flimsy, overloaded boats, knowing that under the UN Convention of the Law at Sea there is a humanitarian obligation to s...