With the threat of a British tanker strike threatening to paralyze 90 per cent of gas stations, the government’s decision to train 200 military teams to get behind the wheel shouldn’t come as a surprise given the UK’s sordid history with oil.

When cabinet minister Francis Maude announced the plan, he created further panic by telling Britons it would be “a sensible precaution to store some extra fuel in jerry cans in your garage”. The fact that those old 20 liter World War II jerry cans were outlawed in Britain decades ago didn’t help and, as The Telegraph newspaper pointed out on 28th March, “In a country where “having a little drink” is taken to mean multiple litres of beer, people took those words as a license to hoard.