The prospect of a four-day strike over pay by the tanker drivers that supply Shell petrol stations has begun to generate near apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Primed by the government invoking emergency procedures last Friday and the panic buying response of motorists after the refinery workers' strike at Grangemouth in April, the message the media is peddling is "oh no, here we go again".

But given that Shell has only one in every 10 filling stations across the country and that these are concentrated in the south-east, the north-west, central Scotland and parts of the Midlands, the headlines are over-egging the pudding.

But what is giving rise to the overreaction is an emerging sense (pdf) of "feel-bad Britain", where issue after issue adds to a sense of gloom, hopelessness and powerlessness as standards of living for the majority of people begin to plummet.

The rising cost of fuel and food, the credit crunch, the fall in house prices and the tailing off of demand in the housing market have all come thick and fast. Wages are not keeping pace and a small minority of wealthy individuals as well as many companies seem immune to and unmoved by what is happening to the majority of people. And on top of this, our public services are not improving despite the money ploughed into them.

In the case of the threatened fuel strike, the workers are demanding a 13% rise but are being offered 6.8% when their bosses got a 15% rise plus bonuses and the company is benefiting as the price of a barrel of oil climbs inexorably to $200.

But the other side to the story of feel-bad Britain is that there is no sense that the government is exercising any control over events. Brown made pleas to both the banks to pass on cuts in interest rates to the customers and to the oil companies to cap prices. They either said no or politely ignored him as nothing has changed. Then Brown tells us he is listening and that he "feels our pain", but still nothing seems to change.

The sense of a government on the slide (but nonetheless immovable until May 2010) adds to this despair. What may bring things to a head – over fuel at least – is if hauliers start to exercise their collective disruptive power as they did back in late 2000 by stopping fuel leaving the refineries and organising go-slows on the motorways.

Already, there have been small signs of this in Scotland and Wales.

If the reaction of the Spanish hauliers is anything to go by, our reliance on private road transport to move goods and products about will be cruelly revealed. In Spain, where mostly small owner-employer operators are protesting over rising fuel costs, the supermarket shelves have started to go bare within just three days.

The general sense of malaise would also become even more apparent if the owners and operators of fishing boats started to blockade ports, as they have done in Spain and Portugal in recent weeks, over the cost of fuel.

For all the headlines that talk of a return to the "dark days" of the 1970s in Britain, only if the hauliers acted en masse would we come close to a replay of those times.