THROUGHOUT much of the Highlands and most of our Islands the price paid for fuel at petrol stations is hugely more expensive than it is in Glasgow or even Inverness.
This extra cost, which I hereby christen "The Highland Sting", may often be of the order of 15 pence per litre.
This is made up of extra delivery costs of the fuel to remote rural and island petrol stations - those that are left - and also because they must charge higher margins to try to make a living.
As long as I can remember, common cause has been made between my party, the SNP, and the Lib Dems as to the need to tackle this problem.
In the first term of the Scottish Parliament I secured a Holyrood Parliamentary committee investigation into the types of ways to solve this problem in practice.
The response of the Labour Liberal Democrat coalition then, was that the power to act lay with Westminster not Holyrood.
They were factually correct: Westminster, not Holyrood, has the power to act.
With power comes responsibility and now that the Lib Dems have joined forces with the Conservatives in London, they have the opportunity to use the power to end the Highland Sting. After all this was and has been for decades a key pledge that they have made in manifestos galore.
But this is not what they are doing.
Instead the tax on fuel is to increase by one pence per litre this October, and by 0.76 pence a litre in January, next year.
These increases were conceived by the London Treasury under Labour and delivered under the Conservative-Lib Dem regime. Yet it gets worse still.
VAT is chargeable on top of the cost of fuel and excise duty - a Westminster tax upon a tax.
And the Lib Dems and Tories in their budget statement raised VAT to 20 per cent from 17.5 per cvent, as from January 4, 2011.
So, the tax on all fuel sold, including in the remote rural Highlands and Islands will be increased fairly substantially with the new Government raising in three different ways.
Of course, as the tax rises so does the differential.
As a result, under the new Conservative/Lib Dem regime, the Highland Sting will become more painful still.
They have promised that there will be "a pilot" of a rural or island fuel reduction scheme. But this is all they have said.
We know neither where, nor when, by what means, nor if the pilot would become a full blown policy for all the areas disadvantaged.
The pilot is for an as yet, undetermined location - or if more than one, locations, for an unspecified amount, of unperceived duration, starting from an unknown date.
And, of course, a pilot will only benefit the area(s) in which it is to be held. All other areas that suffer the Highland Sting will continue so to do - except with increased pain.
The Scottish Government in a letter to Chancellor Osborne on June 18 this year called for the UK Government to reduce the fuel price differential. The previous Labour Government for its period of 13 years refused so to do.
Yet other EU countries have acted. In December 2007 France was able to apply a reduced rate in Corsica, and Greece and Portugal have also applied similar derogations to offset the high cost of fuel in their rural communities.
If other countries can do it, why not Scotland? The answer, I suggest, is that we lack the powers in Scotland to act for ourselves.
This is a graphic example illustrating the need for our own parliament in Scotland to have the range of powers required to remedy a long standing grievance.
After all, Scotland produces energy from almost every natural source known to man - oil, gas, wind, wave, solar and tidal. We have all of the energy, but none of the power.
Therefore, memo to our Government MPs: to deliver the fairness you promise - pass the powers you refuse to use to a body that will - the Scottish Parliament.
