I am an American and we would never put up with the prices that you guys pay over here. Yes, we have had price hikes this last year but $4 per gallon was pretty much a psychological ceiling that could not be broken.
Prices are falling back a bit at the moment and I guess they will stabilize. We are never going to get back to the days of $1.75 but nor will the federal government price us off the roads.
Why are your prices so high here? My take is that it is your crazy welfare system. You just give money away to people that do not want to work and make no contribution to your economy. To do that you raise the money from gas.
You can only spend the money once.

The sooner the Government begin to realise the damage that is being done to the whole economy, the sooner we will get out of this mess.
We cannot go on paying taxes on petrol, which affect everything that we do or buy, and seeing those taxes spent (often wasted) on other things.
I know it has been said before, but we are wasting too much money on everything from benefits, wars, and an over inflated public sector. The government has to get real and tax and spend sensibly.

All of the campaigning for lower petrol costs seems to have died a death. How can we be putting up with these outrageous prices and not shouting about them?
Surely, even MPs and those in positions of responsibility must be hurting, or are they all so protected by expenses that they just do not see how it is affecting ordinary people?

The goverment here in the UK are very greedy. Petrol has dropped lately from around 1.40 pounds a litre back to 1.29 ish. Now however its on its way back up again. Rises about a penny a litre every week. Hasnt the UK got the highest or one of the highest petrol prices in the world? And the country is supposed to be in a economical crisis! so what do they do? add more tax onto everything,rob peter to pay paul and panic. Idiotic way we run our country. The puppets at the top have seriously damaged the name of Great Britian as its certainly not great anymore.