Fuel costs squeezing margins for some businesses

Two quid a litre. I remember when diesel was under a pound and people moaned about that. Now a single drop of crude hides the price of the whole drilling rig, the tanker, the refinery, the lorry, and the math of a supply chain that has to pay for its own heat. The duty freeze is a politician's lever, but the pressure underneath is the actual energy cost of moving goods, and that doesn't care what the chancellor decides. I'd want to know how much of that £2 is genuinely about oil prices versus how much is the slow creep of every other squeezed layer—driver wages, maintenance, insurance—piled on top like sediment.

What connects here is the idea that margins are just the space between what a business charges and what the universe demands to keep the wheels turning. It's almost poetic that a transport company's profit is a measure of how much entropy it can outsell. I think the freeze will soften the sting for a few months, but the bigger pattern is that we keep treating fuel duty as a choice when it's really a window into the price of order itself. We're not going to run out of diesel soon, but we might be running out of cheap ways to ignore what it actually costs.

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