As soaring fuel costs pile pressure on haulage companies, the battle is on for the future of an essential industry
By Mike Wade

If it wasn't for his decidedly civilian demeanour - the big belly and the baggy trousers - you might take Duncan McCracken for an army general, surrounded by his aides-de-camp as he monitors the progress of a campaign from the safety of company headquarters. Above his head, on the wall, a vast satellite screen shows the deployment of his vehicles. At Greenock, one is marked by a red rectangle, while to the east in Bonnybridge there are three green shapes edging down a single street. Further south on this electronic map, many more trucks are visible, scattered along the highways of the north of England. Duncan moves his cursor over a green mark which shows a driver heading for Winsford in Cheshire.

"If you hover over Lawrence, you can see his speed," he announces, rapping out a series of statistics. "Fifty mph. He's done 576 miles in two days. Only 62 miles have been without a load. Not bad."

Comparisons with military operations are not out of place here. Sandy McCracken and Son may be just another "typical Scottish hauler", with Duncan as its operations director, but like many in the road transport industry, its troops see themselves engaged in a battle. Their objective? To persuade an unyielding government to reduce the duty on fuel as costs soar and to impose a pricing formula that will enable hauliers to survive.

Passions are running high. The transport companies' trade organisation, the Road Haulage Association (RHA), believes the mood is now angrier and more embittered than it was seven years ago, when widespread fuel protests rocked Tony Blair's administration and whipped up the right-wing press into a frenzy.

Demonstrations blockaded six out of eight UK oil refineries, prompting the panic buying of fuel all around the country. In some areas hospitals cancelled non-essential operations to reduce ambulance movement, while local radio stations took to broadcasting the locations of petrol stations which still had supplies.

And that was in the days when the price of fuel had climbed to around 61p a litre, not including VAT. In some forecourts last week, the cost of a litre of diesel had climbed to 89p, comprising a base sum of 38p with the rest of the price made up in government duty. VAT is the additional charge, which has taken prices over £1 a litre.

In this volatile market, the decisions made in McCracken's traffic office at Rigside near Lanark assume even greater importance than usual for the company. The business freights coal, animal feeds and other large industrial loads between customers all over the UK. Orders from regular clients are often negotiated on a daily basis from the office, journeys planned and drivers briefed by telephone.

For the business to meet its tight margins every truck must be full for as long as possible and finding the shortest route is essential. "Get cracking with Sandy McCracken" shout the decals emblazoned on the trucks: in this business, distance is money.

Not surprisingly, Duncan spends the day number-crunching as he negotiates prices and he has all the figures about fuel at his fingertips. "It was 74p a litre in the summer," he says, bashing the numbers into the calculator that is never far from his grasp. "Now it's 89p - that's a 15p rise in maybe four months. On our usage that level of price rise hammers you for 30 grand a month.

"If we earned that much in a month, we'd be doing well. But losing that amount " he lets the thought die with a sad shake of his head. "No wonder I've got high blood pressure."

It is true that occasionally there is more than a hint of paranoia about some of the truckers' complaints - especially when a government transport spokesman hoves into view - and a sour whiff of xenophobia when conversation turns to competition from Polish, Hungarian and Czech hauliers. But it is plain that the McCrackens are respectable people who are coming to the end of their tether as costs spiral upwards.

The business was founded in 1978 by Sandy - Duncan's father - who is its managing director. In those days it was a one-truck operation and Sandy was the driver, moving scrap metal around Lanarkshire and south to Sheffield.

Now McCrackens is among the biggest concerns in Scotland, a 43-vehicle business which runs all over Britain. It has sidelines in storage and recycling and employs more than 50 people, a size which, according to the breed of researchers who construct social surveys, should put Sandy and his wife Pat in social class A. Comparisons to plump, leisured aristocrats end there. Sandy is thin and looks exhausted.

Pat McCracken is the brains of the operation, the financial director. "She's got the whip", they chuckle behind her back in the transport office. Brisk and business-like in her smart suit, her face is etched with worry. Something has to give she reckons, but she couldn't stomach the kinds of protests which went on last time.

"That was horrific and it was the individual punter who suffered," she says. "But it also affected every one of us, because we were all running out of fuel. It was something that escalated and I don't think that's the way to go about it.

"But hauliers are sick to the back teeth. It's been really hard over the last four years and now it's beyond a joke. You get somewhere, you cut costs and the next thing you know, you get another increase in price.

"How can you work when your biggest single cost fluctuates so much? If someone in the government could show me, I would be very grateful. We are not looking to bring the government down - we just want them to bring the fuel prices down. They should be working with people to make things better, but they don't seem to listen and they don't care. This is important for everyone in the country."

Nothing about her speech suggests Pat was ever a card-carrying Labour supporter, but her distaste for certain politicians is shared by every haulier you encounter. Rightly or wrongly, the government in London has become the focus for all the hauliers' ills.

Over the years, truckers have complained that they have been swamped in regulations, though close inspection suggests many of these new rules started life in Brussels, not Westminster. European work/time directives, road transport and training directives, legislation directed at the transportation of foodstuffs, regulations over drivers' hours, frequent health and safety checks - the list goes on. But even when it is conceded that the rules are international in scope, the conventional wisdom in the transport industry is that other countries only nod at the spirit of the law, while Britain ensures it is enforced.

The "green lobby" is perceived as just another battalion ranged against the trade. Hauliers are an easy target but they respond that they have complied with all the regulations that have been aimed at them. The McCrackens' modern fleet has been brought in line with Euro 3 and Euro 4 requirements for emissions, the latest regulations only introduced last year. A truck brought new today - if you had £100,000 to spare - would produce the same level of emissions as 20 trucks built in 1990. The industry has moved on.

"Hauliers are as environmentally friendly as anybody. We get no encouragement from the government to be environmentally friendly, there are no incentives. But we do it anyway," says Pat McCracken.

"Nobody seems to appreciate that. They go on about getting the trucks off the road and replacing them with trains. But you won't be able to drive a train into a farmyard, will you?" It's an old cliché, she adds, but If you bought it, a truck brought it'.

If these are the trenchant views from a tiny village in deepest Lanarkshire, they find a loud echo in the industry at large and at the RHA. Last week the organisation's Scottish office convened a meeting to propose its notion of a "fuel price regulator", a scale of charges which would enable hauliers to pass on excess fuel costs to their customers when petrol and diesel prices are high, and offer a rebate should prices fall back.

It was a very canny manoeuvre. The regulator scheme was first suggested at Westminster by the SNP and there are hopes among the campaigners that the Scottish Parliament will prove more sympathetic to the hauliers cause than the administration in London.

There is already a precedent for such a conflict between the parliaments. Whitehall officials were incandescent when Alex Salmond attacked the Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs last month over an alleged withdrawal of financial aid for Scottish farmers affected by the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Who's to say the first minister won't intervene in the same way on behalf of the road freight industry north of the Border?

"There will be people who think we are being too soft, who want to take further action. But we are hopeful that if the public and business swing behind us, it will make the government think again," says Phil Flanders, the director of the RHA in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The cautious approach is welcomed by many, particularly those who fear the government and police response will be more interventionist this time around should fuel protests erupt. Senior RHA officials report that the police have videoed meetings and demonstrations that have taken place over the last two years at Stirling, Forfar and Grangemouth - "there's the air of a police state" mutters one. The fear is that ringleaders will be targeted for arrest.

"There are new laws about now," says Jimmy Macauley, a bear of man in a leather jacket, who is a senior member of the RHA and runs a heavy haulage business in Blantyre. "They can take your operator's licence off you, lift you and lock you up. The police could do anything to you.

"We have to go through the proper channels here and if the government doesn't listen, we'll have to get the public on our side. But there is a lot of hatred brewing up and a lot of things could happen which the RHA would have no responsibility over."

Macauley's fears, irrational or not, are widely shared and are galvanising truckers to think positively. The first impulse of the industry's organisers is to gather the support of the public and of sympathetic politicians.

There is already action at a local level. In the west, 41-year-old Shona Clark and a group of hauliers based around Prestwick Airport have banded together and plan to leaflet supermarkets in Ayr, Kilmarnock and Irvine to win public support.

"We'll be asking the public whether they are aware about what is going on. Do they really know that a litre is made up largely of duty and VAT?" she says. "If the public really understood that, I think they would be up in arms. Obviously the government isn't interested in the road haulage industry. They're always going on about polluting the air and so on. We just have to change their minds."

There are other more drastic sanctions which the hauliers could apply, if persuasion doesn't work, without necessarily running the risk of arrest. MacAuley voices a means of escalating action, which is favoured by a sizeable minority of truckers.

"If the government won't do anything, one of the solutions could be for the whole country to mothball its vehicles for a couple of weeks," he says. "Take every commercial vehicle off the road for two weeks - and then you'd see what happens. The last time they reckon that if we had stayed out another day or two Tony Blair would have been out."

Flanders is sympathetic, but it would be difficult to organise, he reckons. "There is no way that I would do something that is breaking the law, and no haulier that I know wants to do that. But when frustration starts to boil over, when you're stuck in a corner, and you're going out of business, that's when you start to panic," he says.

"You would need a hell of a lot of hauliers to stop working and not everyone can afford that. We need to take a sounding and people have to think very hard. But that could very well be a good option. It's a peaceful protest. It would take a few days and the country would grind to a halt. If a supermarket doesn't get a delivery on a daily basis, it's knackered. Half the factories would be knackered. The government would be knackered."

Back at Rigside the notion of a withdrawal of labour is treated with scepticism.

"Well, it would prove a point," says Duncan. McCracken.

"Aye, but people would never stick together. We're not a national industry like that," says Sandy, shaking his head.

The McCrackens' more immediate concern is that the world should understand the depth of their grievance. All those regulations imposed and complied with. All that investments in green tucks and technology. And now consistent price rises which are threatening to break their backs.

Duncan shows me out to a truck, so I can get a flavour for the driver's lifestyle. There's a sat-nat system and a hands-free phone at the front, and a bed in the recess at the back of the driver's seat.

A dreamcatcher is stuck to the window, and near it a newish sign which reads: "If you observe someone smoking in this vehicle, a complaint may be made to Sandy McCracken."

The McCrackens can lay down the law to their employees, but whether the government will play by their rules remains to be seen.