If only Britain could panic-buy a capable prime minister Marina Hyde
Oct 01, 2021
3 minutes
Illustration Eleanor Shakespeare
Is the UK’s government’s fabled Nudge Unit on a paddleboard somewhere in Crete? You have to ask, after Downing Street urged people not to panic-buy petrol, a piece of behavioural science almost guaranteed to make people panic-buy petrol. If only there’d been some kind of rehearsal event last year, when telling people not to fight over bog roll generated counterintuitive scenes of Andrex-fuelled violence in the supermarket aisles.
Having said all that, calls for the army to step in to assist with driving petrol tankers feel like
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