FUEL tax protesters showed a combination of compassion and tactical skill in calling off their blockade of depots and refineries, and so bring the country back from the brink yesterday.

Sadly, the Government has so far demonstrated nothing of the sort.

Estimates of how long it will take to get back to normal vary from a few days to three weeks.

There will continue to be interruptions to services and hardship for some individuals in the meantime.

But the worst of the possible effects, food and drug shortages, mass lay-offs and a paralysed health service among them, appear to have been headed off.

Having won the public relations battle, the demonstrators could see that continued action would have brought about dire consequences and opinions would have shifted against them.

In this area animal welfare was a major consideration.

If milk couldn't be collected and animals slaughtered on site or left to die because they could not be fed or even taken to the slaughterhouse, then sympathy for the action would quickly have started to evaporate.

If the beleaguered health service could point to deaths, as it had started to predict, then support would have disappeared.

In fact, nothing better illustrates how well the protesters executed their plan than the manner in which they ended the stranglehold they had put on the country's transport system.

What made this a landmark dispute was the nature of its organisation.

The Trades Union Congress, coincidentally meeting this week in Glasgow, not only played no part in the action, it even took sides with the Government in urging the demonstrators to call off their action.

The latter took no notice, thus compounding the impression of the TUC's impotence and irrelevance.

Instead it has taken a seemingly disparate, yet superbly organised, group of farmers, hauliers, truckers and taxi drivers to plug in to the mood of the nation.

It is no wisdom of hindsight to point out that fury about the price of fuel has been building for weeks.

It has been reported often enough by this newspaper.

Rural areas like Westmorland are more likely to be hit by high fuel prices, because of the economy's reliance on agriculture and tourism and because of the inadequacy of public transport.

For the same reasons it was also particularly vulnerable to the effects of the action.

Yet the only people to fail to see that the vast majority of the public was on the demonstrators' side were members of the Cabinet.

The Chancellor Gordon Brown seemed to lead Prime Minister Tony Blair and other ministers by their noses into a succession of misjudgements and ill-timed statements during the crisis.

It's all very well being prudent, as Mr Brown likes to say, but there comes a time when the pursestrings need to be loosened.

With the double windfall of extra revenue from high fuel prices, both through taxation at the pump and of North Sea extractions, most economists agree the Government could have reduced its cut by seven or eight pence per litre, and still meet its budgeted income from fuel.

To have done so would not need to have been seen as a U-turn or a climb-down.

It would have been seen as sensible.

Instead it refused to relieve the burden on desperate sectors of industry and isolated country-dwellers, on the pretext that services would suffer if it did; it talked of intimidation when newsreels failed to show any evidence of the kind; and it tried to lay blame at the doors of OPEC, the oil companies and retailers when the lion's share of prices are demonstrably down to the Government.

The protesters have warned they will be back if nothing happens within 60 days, which neatly takes us just past the next mini-budget.

Let us all hope that the Government responds with a substantial cut in fuel tax.

To misread the signs so badly again would be unforgivable.