So the authorities are meeting to decide what can replace the closing Murco oil refinery down in Milford Haven.

It hardly needs a meeting: Nothing can replace it.

It must be reopened, now. And if they can find no private firms to take it over it must be run as a public concern.

Perhaps it is more than ten years since the tanker drivers strike, but many of us will remember its effects - the lengthy queues at petrol stations which barely had any fuel anyway; the cancelled journeys so you had enough petrol for a real emergency, the near collapse of normal life.

Society is now at such a point where a lack of petrol is the nearest we come to Armageddon.

We noticed it particularly down here because we are on the main route from the haven, whether fuel is carried by tanker, by pipeline, or by trains rattling through Pontarddulais.

And we are still a long way off the environmentalists’ dream of electric cars.

Petrol is still the main driver of the economy. It is not as if an oil refinery is likely to lose money, unless we adopt the usual Westminster tactic of leaving it to be run by idiots.

This is something that merits a meeting of the Government emergency committee COBRA.

It is no use waiting until after the emergency has happened.

Let’s see our politicians earning their inflated salaries for a change, and reacting in advance, not waiting until disaster strikes.