BUSINESS NEWS

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) recently agreed to pump crude oil at full capacity. This doesn’t happen very often. Usually, Opec members agree to produce less oil than they could, in order to keep the price up. But now they’re pumping as much as they can in order to help bring the price down.

So - if you find yourself at an Islington dinner party / the Dog and Bone in Kenilworth / a Treasury meeting and someone is blaming high UK petrol prices on Opec, TUPNews recommends you score knowledge points by insisting that Opec is doing everything it can and the real culprit is high fuel taxes (oil costs $67 a barrel, the government takes $180 in tax for every barrel’s worth of petrol) and under-investment in Western refinery capacity. You don’t even have to understand what the last bit means, it should shut them up and you will look the daddy.