WHAT a week for the petrol crisis to be double-parked on the horizon. All around us weather of biblical incon-venience throws up storms, floods and snow. And then the petrol-heads resume their menacing moans.

In one of the many ironies that come the way of those who sit and watch the headlines bob by, national newspapers which were lambasting our high fuel taxes a few weeks ago are now worrying about global warming. Without pausing to wonder if there might not be a link, the poor confused things.

The weather this week has been unusually terrible and Britons traditionally like nothing better than a spot of extreme inclemency. It gives us something to talk about.

The Ouse has risen to its highest for years and flooded widely, blizzards have struck parts of Yorkshire, trains out of York have been cancelled and Noah has been spotted visiting the King's Arms (one of these facts might not be true). Many other parts of the country have been afflicted by the weather, with the already soggy South-East sustaining the earliest damage.

Now it is a brave meteorologist who will put their finger on the weather map and say without qualification that global warming is to blame for all this weather. Yet the evidence gathers each year like a thumping great storm cloud, complete with warning bolts of lightning. The inescapable looms above us: the way we live, and especially our dependence on the car, is beginning to affect our climate.

For all such worries, during September's petrol crisis the perfectly valid environmental argument was drowned out amid the fuss and fury. A motley alliance of farmers, truckers and petrol-heads - led by the ridiculous David Handley - held the country to ransom for a few long days by blocking petrol supplies. For some reason, the selfish actions of a disgruntled few struck a chord with many people, all of which led to the gravest political crisis Tony Blair has faced.

At the time these rag-bag activists - whose protests would surely have been broken up if they had been old-style union activists - set a 60-day deadline for Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown. As November 13 looms, the Government looks ahead in bewilderment, planning how best to deal with this modern political crisis.

Now as a walker, cyclist and motorist, I'd say, yes, petrol is expensive - but cars, though certainly convenient, do damage the way we live, and so petrol has a price above whatever we have to pay at the pumps. Cutting fuel taxes in response to bullying by truckers and farmers would set a tricky precedent: if you don't like something, bring the country to a standstill and you'll get your way.

As for the notion being floated that rural dwellers should pay lower road tax, don't a lot of wealthy people live in the country? Why should they benefit when poor urban dwellers would still pay the full price? A knotty one, that.

As part of their planned protest, hauliers intend to spend five days driving from Jarrow to London, bringing their nuisance road train to York en-route.

This form of protest is a crude modern echo of the Jarrow Crusade when, in the autumn of 1936, some 300 hunger marchers walked to London. These protesters were seeking the right to work and food, while their modern-day counterparts will sit in lorries and grumble about the price of diesel. From this comparison you can see that at least life has moved on.

Interestingly, when the original Jarrow marchers strode towards London, certain newspapers complained that some of the men were wearing new boots and so could not be poor at all.

I wonder if the editor of the Daily Mail will send reporters out to check on the state of the tyres on the lorries? And, from the likely size of some of the truckers, can we get away with calling these new protesters the Jarrow munchers?