I did say I was being paranoid, Jon. (My excuse is that I was, unknowingly, sickening for a bug. I should have recognised the symptom) But someone in the press pointed out how we had gone for the refineries in Kosovo to paralyse the country, and we've now seen how easy it is to do it without bombs, relying on the self-centredness of the population. We have also seen how easy it is to whip up violence and witch-hunt behaviour. This does have me uneasy, jarring the image I have had of the place where I live. I believe Tony Blair is wrong to say that demonstration and protest is not part of British political behaviour, but I have been as guilty of blindness in forgetting the Gordon riots.I am puzzled by the references to mobile phones as the medium for this. In Portsmouth, there was a contained community where people knew each other. This is more difficult to see applying across the country. You have to know people's numbers, and that they agree with you for this to work. I've been involved in an organised phone tree, and it isn't easy to imagine a spontaneous version.
I don't think that these things were, themselves, a conspiracy beyond their immediate purposes. But they have shown that we are vulnerable to influences which can whip up extreme reactions. And there are people who might like to have that knowledge. Whether they are people with access to the means is another matter.
Since my intemperate, not entirely serious post, a number of other things have made me less than happy. The govt. web site of lists of garages, which someone was able to titivate each day, changing the format from Excel to Acrobat to CSV, never added the list of occupations entitled to buy fuel, which I only found on teletext. Both of these means are not universally available, anyway, which enhanced the word of mouth spreading of inadequate information which led to pointless queueing. The selected garages were not necessarily in places where queues could easily be accommodated. The nearest one to me had a motorway sliproad and a roundabout so that three streams were waiting. I think, from the rate of movement, that the sliproad was given priority. If these were the plans they had for the gulf war, they weren't very good.
There was no limit on the amount of fuel bought. In the circumstances, I feel that there should have been, from as early in the business as possible. I remember rationing. It worked. It should have been part of the current plans. Organising parties in breweries and ways out of paper bags come to mind. Probably the inability of a government (whatever colour) to organise better is most worrying.
Penny