These are undoubtedly tough times for road hauliers. A tractor and trailer unit can easily set them back £100,000 while a year's-worth of diesel, including that tax upon a tax, VAT, now costs more than £50,000.

Fuel prices have risen so steeply in recent months that diesel now accounts for 40 per cent of an operator's costs. These costs have to be met somewhere along the line - either by the hauliers' customers, who in their turn have to pass them on to their own customers, or by the hauliers themselves. And in an industry with wafer thin margins the latter is rarely an option.

Which means that the trucker's higher diesel costs usually means higher prices for everybody.

This is not an issue affecting just one sector of the economy; it is a symptom of the seismic inflationary pressures now building up within the UK economy.

But while, say, the soaring price of food is largely beyond the control of the Government, Chancellor Alistair Darling could - assuming he wanted to and Gordon Brown let him - do something to relieve the squeeze on hauliers and private motorists alike.

He could cut fuel duty - or at least scrap the 2p per litre rise planned for later this year.

He won't, of course. Not least because record oil prices are a bonanza for the Treasury at a time when economic growth is slowing and tax receipts from other sources show signs of falling.

Besides, it's as hard to get this Government to perform a U-turn as it is to turn an artic round in an alleyway.

At the very least, though, there has to be some recognition from Whitehall that a critical industry (road haulage) is facing its toughest challenge in living memory.

Hauliers are realistic businessmen. They know that the underlying cost of crude oil is unlikely to abate significantly in the short term. There are too many geopolitical factors preventing that. Witness the six-week shutdown of Exxon Mobil's operations in Nigeria and the refusal by Opec, the cartel of petroleum exporters, to even consider increasing output in order to offset record prices. Add to that the everincreasing surge in demand for black gold from developing countries such as India and China and you have the perfect inflationary storm.

Ranting about oil company profits won't cut prices at the pumps; but a slight tweak of fiscal policy on the part of the Government will.