The government is sliding into election mode and has given a prety clear committment not to increase duty during this Parliament. Mind you, there were some weasel words about 'so long as savings can be identified'.

If Osborne sticks to that then we'll go through an entire five year Parliament without a fuel duty increase for the first time probably in decades, as this Government is yet to increase fuel tax.

However, they did increase VAT to 20% which slapped another 4p on a litre and the Cameron Governments quiet contentment with Sterlings slide has seen a litre of petrol roughly 12p more expensive than when this Government came in.

There's no doubt they're all already in election mode, mind you the previous Labour Govt did increase fuel tax by 7p in the two years prior to the last election - during the recession, thanks Darling/Gordon. One of them was a 2p rise to cancel out their VAT rate cut. They wanted everything to be cheaper - except petrol.

Even though there is huge tax on the retail of road fuel, don't forget that a raft of additional taxes were introduced upstream too, so the whole thing and us are being taxed to the edge.

I also saw a programme on TV, that showed that a £4 bottle of wine only has 20p of wine in it as there is a £3.80 tax, duty and bottling overhead which has to be met before the actual wine is paid for. This is all paid out of income already taxed at 25%.

Yes, but. All of us expect the govt. (whichever one) to provide services for us out of taxation. Just now govt. expenditure exceeds income, so all we can do is argue about which of our vices is taxed too much. We could drink or smoke less, but we can't easily find an untaxed supplier of road fuel, so all we can do is moan that not enough tax is spent on road maintenance. Keep calm and carry on - or drive less?

And as I have pointed out before, a gallon of beer is several times as expensive as a gallon of fuel, and beer does not need to be drilled out of inhospitable places like the North Sea or the Arabian desert.