IF ONLY it were as simple as those manning the blockades appear to think, Gordon Brown could overnight knock a few pennies off the price of petrol. The protestors could go home happily and the rest of us could get on with our lives unconvenienced.

But it isn't that simple. That was shown yesterday when the Labour Prime Minister said: "We cannot and we will not alter Government policy through blockades and pickets." This was straight from the Margaret Thatcher handbook on industrial relations, a handbook that led her to ban trade unions' secondary picketing in the 1980s.

Yet today we have the strange sight of farmers blockading oil refineries - secondary picketing by nature although not in law.

This is one of many contradictions in the current dispute. The Conservative-inclined supporters of the protest were the loudest to condemn the May Day anti-capitalist riots in London and yet this is, essentially, an anti-capitalist protest: it has been brought to a head by Opec artificially limiting supply to push up the price of crude oil.

And the regular airing of the fact that Britain has the highest petrol prices in Europe is the most persuasive argument so far in favour of tax harmonisation and the single currency. In one fell blockade, the protestors are unwittingly supporting the euro.

The contradictions don't end there. The protestors claim to be working on behalf of small businesses and rural communities. Yet it is small businesses - with their one truck caught up in miles of stagnant traffic - and rural communities - North Yorkshire was the first area of the North-East to run dry yesterday - that are being hardest hit. Even though, as the IRA sadly proved, you only get governments in this country to listen when you target London.

And another contradiction: Opec's decision to increase output by 800,000 barrels a day has been trumpeted as the end of the dispute as oil prices will fall by the New Year. But this is really just another 800,000 barrels of smoke to be pumped into the sky. We are also in Flood Action Week, called because climatic change is wreaking havoc with our weather. What causes climatic change? Burning more fossil fuel.

Yet the Government, which could surely have done more to head off this crisis in the last two Budgets, also contradicts itself. Cutting fuel duty will not harm spending on health and education, as it claims. It set its last Budget expecting oil to be $22 a barrel; it is now $34. As a result it has a £4bn tax windfall.

The question for today is how that unexpected bonus should be spent for the good of everyone in the country.

Fuel duty could be cut by 8p a litre which would appease the protestors but would set an anarchic precedent.

Instead, the Government should straddle the line. It should slowly make fuel duty more comparable with Europe while at the same time encouraging more research into environmentally-friendly fuels and investing in proper rural and freight transport systems