FairFuelUK (FFUK) co-founder Howard Cox has said he is “absolutely disgusted” with the Labour Party’s apparent disinterest in the issue of fuel prices, after a fringe event on the subject held at the Labour Party conference in Manchester attracted just a handful of attendants.
FFUK spent around £4,000 – including paying over £2,600 to Labour itself - to send five delegates to the conference and hold the fringe meeting, which was chaired by FFUK spokesman and motoring journalist Quentin Willson. Despite sending every Labour MP a personal invitation, advertising the event to the 10,000 delegates in the programme, and circulating an open letter to the party at the conference, however, just 16 people attended the 60 minute meeting – none of them Labour MPs.
The aim of the meeting was to establish the Labour Party’s position in terms of a range of fuel-price related issues, including FFUK’s proposals for a 3p/litre duty cut and a full public enquiry into fuel prices. Cox said the conference experience indicates Labour just isn’t interested, however.
“I’m livid with the Labour Party at the moment and so is Quentin Willson,” he told Motortransport.co.uk. “We just can’t believe the party isn’t taking [the concerns of] 32m road users seriously.”
This isn’t the first time FFUK has failed to make headway with anyone senior in the Labour Party on these issues, however: Cox said repeated attempts over the last four years to engage Labour leader Ed Milliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls had not been responded to.
“There are individual Labour MPs who are very supportive, but as a party, they’re still hell-bent on the approach of cutting VAT, which doesn’t help businesses at all,” he added.
FFUK will be attending both the Conservative and LibDem Party conferences and is on course to publish its own general election manifesto on 22 October, said Cox, which among other things will contain the results of its recent online poll to determine which politicians are most trusted by road users.
