It's the taxes over there in the UK... The overall price of oil is NOT necessarily driven up by 'greedy big oil' as popularly believed... it's mostly driven up (or down) by commodities futures speculators.... people who wouldn't know what to do with a barrel of oil if it was sitting in front of them.

Add to that our lack of refineries partly because of the NIMBYs & BANANAs (Not In My Back Yard, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and we have a problem... Hell, even one of the Saudi princes, visiting W a couple months back said basically "sure, we'll up our production, but it won't do you any good since you don't have the refinery capacity..."

Blaming everything on Big Oil or Greedy Arabs or any one thing is waaaay oversimplifying a complex problem while wearing blinders with your fingers in your ears going 'lalalalalalalala'.

Unless you blame the government, then you're probably right.

I've paid London prices for gas, and while it was cheaper at the time (79p/L I think, this was 2001) it didn't seem so bad overall because I was driving a little Ford rental rollerskate... but it got us where we wanted to go. The weird thing was learning to shift lefthanded.

And paulgw: drink your local ale - it's cheaper & way better for you!