DESPITE the surprisingly persistent attempts by lots of people, from the French post-structuralists to government ministers, to persuade us otherwise, most of us believe that there is such a thing as the truth, and that there are facts, which we can – at least in theory – verify.

“Facts”, as Burns put it, “are chiels that winna ding”, while the journalist CP Scott, who ran The Guardian in the days they took these matters seriously, maintained: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”

Well, this is only a comment column, but while I’m convinced by the notion of objective truth, facts seem not to be exactly the same thing. Things like mathematics are abstract, internally consistent, absolute truths (even if Bertrand Russell showed that they couldn’t be proven), but facts are “things that happen”, and the trouble with things that happen is that they happen in time, in the real world, and to people.

All those things, unlike a claim such as “two plus two makes four” or A= πr2, make them subject to change.

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Last Thursday, it was a fact that there was no general shortage of fuel. A few petrol stations, almost exclusively in London and the south east, and most operated either by BP or Tesco, ran out because there was a shortage of tanker drivers. But there was plenty of fuel around, they would have been restocked within a couple of days, and all the other outlets were open.

The BBC’s reporter on that evening’s news, broadcasting – reasonably enough, since it was the story – from one of the places that had run out, made a point of saying that there were four or five other petrol stations within a mile of where he was, and they all had plenty of fuel, and no one needed to panic. Then a spokesman for the Prime Minister said: “There is no shortage of fuel in the UK and people should continue to buy fuel as normal.”

All of that was perfectly true then. Yet by yesterday, up to 90 per cent of petrol stations had run out of fuel, the government had suspended competition regulations in order to let fuel companies restore supply, implemented a complete (and probably pointless) reversal of their immigration policy to encourage up to 5,000 lorry drivers from the EU to come here, and considered mobilising the army.

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Why did something that was true – there’s no fuel shortage – suddenly become so untrue? Well, at first, because people are morons. And then because people are rational. Rather like a run on a bank started by a baseless rumour, or the panic buying of pasta and loo roll that we saw in the early days of the pandemic, people perceive a problem that doesn’t really exist, and race to prevent it affecting them.

The trouble is that if enough of them do it, the problem ceases to be illusory or negligible and becomes real and serious. And at a certain point, the panic buying stops being an idiotic reaction, and starts to look like a sensible one. If something is about to run out, and you need it and might still be able to get it, it would be daft not to.

In any case, some people aren’t panic buying, but really need to put fuel in their car because they’ve run low, or are about to go on a long journey. Since more than 100 million litres of fuel gets sold every day on average in the UK, that’s quite a lot of them, and it’s those nurses and teachers and retail staff who now can’t get to their work.

This is just the latest crisis in what seems to be a long list of foul-ups and, as is the norm when things go wrong, people naturally look for someone to blame. This tendency is even more pronounced when something is your own fault (the “your” in this case being the collective behaviour of the public).

The government expressly told us that as long as we didn’t panic buy, it would be all right, so obviously we immediately went out and panic bought petrol like Idaho survivalists stocking up on ammunition and canned goods.

Having done so, the next step is to blame the government. Some of us, depending on our prejudices, will also want to blame the oil companies, the capitalist system in general, or the “mainstream media”. Or, always the safest of all bets, Brexit.

What we seldom remember, however, is that while any of these groups or factors may have some responsibility for the spike in gas prices, the shortage of HGV drivers, the failures of the supply chain, the misinterpretation of data, the growth of monopolies, or whatever other calamity you care to name, many of these failings are also ultimately our own.

For the past two years we’ve had a genuine external thing to blame in the form of the pandemic, and politicians and big business are right – up to a point – to cite it as a factor, probably the chief factor, in lots of our current problems. But it won’t wash forever.

It’s clear that a “just in time” supply chain brings large gains in efficiency, and thus profits, and thus cheaper prices and increased choice for consumers. But only until it breaks down. At the moment it’s doing that on a global scale; Covid, energy prices, and even things like the container ship that got stuck in the Suez canal for a week, have created a butterfly effect.

Big firms that relied on imported labour for low-paid work, or that drove down the wages of drivers are now having to shell out, and many of us will say, good, about time. Even the government – a Tory government – is trying to sell the line that wage rises are a benefit. But there’s no point in pretending that it won’t mean higher prices, too, and the danger of inflation.

The market is undoubtedly the mechanism that supplies optimal outcomes, but the market is not an abstraction, or confined to the decisions of governments or corporations, which on the whole undermine its effectiveness. It’s the innumerable, cumulative decisions of consumers, and if we choose to value things on their cheapness or their convenience, we’re making trade-offs that are reflected in other areas, such as reliability, availability or quality. Some things are our own fault.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.