ANOTHER VOICE
How we are mocked by the greedy garagiste
MATTHEW PARRIS
Let us salute Paul Gizzonio. The ges- ture will not be widely understood among my countrymen — I realise that — but among Spectator readers at least one can hope for a measure of understanding of what the term 'free market' means.
Mr Gizzonio is the garage owner from Peartree in Derby who this week raised the price of fuel at his pumps by 300 per cent, to £2.50 per litre of super-unleaded. The enterprising garagiste explained that reserves were running out because of the extraordinary demand and so he had put up his prices to restrain it.
The cynical among us may speculate about other motives in the tangle that doubtless inhabits the Gizzonic breast, but that is beside the point. Adam Smith's invisible hand was just that: invisible, even to the main actors in the comedy of eco- nomics. It is not necessary for Mr Gizzonio to set forth into Peartree each morning spurred by a selfless zeal to dampen demand and restore equilibrium to the super-unleaded market. Mr Gizzonio may be acting purely for the benefit of Mr Giz- zonio, Mrs Gizzonio and the little Gizzo- nios, but the effect of his actions should, if Smith is right, prove more widely benign.
Either there is going to be a prolonged shortage of fuel, or there isn't. If there is, we had better start rationing the stuff fast, and unless the government plans to issue coupons, the market will have to do it — by price. But if (as is more likely) no serious shortage looms, then what better way to knock the stuffing out of the straw threat than the sort of face-slapping price-hike which turns hysterical motorists back from their silly queues to reconsider the wisdom of it all? When the hysteria subsides, Mr Gizzonio may encounter a little customer resistance to his forecourt, even at the lower prices, but soon people will forget. Entrepreneurs are often misunderstood for a while.
I saw the queues for myself on Tuesday night. An old friend from university, now a tax inspector in Tonbridge, was having a 50th birthday party and I took the train down from Charing Cross (or `London's Charing Cross Station' as one now has to say on the BBC). After five months in a lonely outpost or at sea in the Southern Ocean, I am still finding the noise and daz- zle, the headless-chicken quality, of metropolitan life slightly shocking. And as my train rattled over bridges and suburban high streets, I saw, at petrol station after petrol station, the strings of red tail-lights stretching out of the forecourts and down the road. It was the same in Kent. At the party everyone was talking about it.
At a garage in Tonbridge I saw people running in some kind of panic — I could not make out why, but it was no doubt induced by the crush, the impatience, the wait and the fear that it will be the cus- tomer in front of you who gets the last drop. Returning after ten o'clock at night, the queues were even longer. 'People see other people queuing, and they think, "It's all going to run out; I'd better join the queue too",' my taxi-driver said. 'The first people to panic-buy were being illogical, but if other people are going to be illogical, it's not illogical to be illogical too — if you get my drift.'
I did get his drift; but (if you get mine) I find all this hysteria strangely sobering. A man in my compartment on the train was on his mobile telephone, discussing the petrol panic. Think of the complexity of that instrument. Think of the genius behind the electronics and the technical wizardry in assembling them. Think of the logistical triumph implied by the national and inter- national networks we have now erected to carry the signals. Think of the motor-car itself, which was coming to collect that man, the refined and super-engineered thing which the modern internal combus- tion engine has become. Think of the intri- cacy and sheer concrete substance of the highway and signalling and traffic control we have put in place to carry the car.
And think of the intelligence, the careful, calm intelligence that lies behind these things — marvels, all of them, monuments to the human brain and human reason, monuments to logic, monuments to team- work and communication, monuments to the co-operative spirit.
And then a sudden panic about petrol. It is a panic which everybody knows to be silly because everybody knows there's no real, physical shortage, and little likeli- hood of one. But because everybody's a little afraid that somebody else will act less reasonably than them, and because every- body knows that if this fear should grow, it will begin to feed upon itself and cause the very thing which at the outset it was unrea- sonable to fear, and because nobody among us carries the confidence or authority to prick — by an act of assurance or command — the swelling bubble, the bubble swells. Is it not odd that our lead- ers can send troops into Sierra Leone, trig- ger Trident missiles at the press of a fin- ger, cause hospitals to be built or universi- ties to be founded, and marshal and survey the whole great structure of things and ideas that underpins a 21st-century nation, and yet stand helpless, mouthing plati- tudes, as primitive panics run amok among us? How far we have come, and how little we have advanced, and how very, very vul- nerable we are.
This is how wars start. This is how a shout of 'fire' kills thousands without need. This is how markets billow and then implode, ruining millions. This is how des- perate passengers claw themselves into an impasse and never reach the lifeboats that were always there. This is how reputations — political, commercial, artistic — rise faster than they merit, then fall far harder than they deserve. At root it concerns mis- trust, of others and of ourselves. All fashion is founded in fear.
Julian Critchley — dear and missed never much cared for garagistes. In the week in which we mourn him, such a garag- iste mocks us as Julian would have mocked him.
Matthew Pains is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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