Just outside Tbilisi was the locomotive factory. This was the crumbling industrial cathedral. The great complex was almost deserted. Only a handful of workers were busy trying to complete one shiny new locomotive. They explained that they desperately needed to finish and ship it to the Russian railways if the factory was not to go bankrupt. They themselves would see little or no money. The proceeds of the sale would be set against the huge gas and electricity bills the complex owed Russian energy suppliers.

Then one of the workers went on to give me a short course in Stalinist economics. This factory had been one of only three in the Soviet Union to make locomotives for the country’s railroads. In the same way only a handful of factories had made television sets or lightbulbs. Often these factories had to draw their raw materials from other factories thousands of kilometres away. It seemed a fantastical, inefficient and wasteful system. But it had all been designed by Stalin to ensure complete control from the centre.

Only with the Kremlin directing traffic and making decisions would anything get made anywhere in the empire. Of course, when the centre collapsed and the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the system seized up. Almost nothing got produced. It was industrial entropy. It could never happen in the West, I thought. I was somewhat naïve.

It took only a week in September for Britain to grind almost to a halt when protesters took to the streets to block the entrances to oil refineries. The protesters were angry at high gasoline prices, and above all at the high taxes on fuel imposed by the British government to fill its coffers. Those taxes, the highest in Europe, amounted to 76 per cent of the cost of every litre of gas. And a litre of gas in Britain costs $1.70.

Two things were remarkable about these blockades. First, there were only nine major refineries in the country and so it only took a couple of thousand protesters to make the blockades work. This was the capitalist version of Stalinist economics. The shock on the faces of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his ministers when they realized how vulnerable their economy and their government were was vivid.

Part of that shock flowed from the unpleasant realization of how little control they had over the oil companies. The shock became anger as the suspicion grew that the oil companies were playing along with the protesters, refusing to order their drivers to move out and deliver the fuel. Why? Because it was also in their interest to see the protest succeed. If the taxes on gas were reduced, their profit margins might increase or, at the very least, they would sell more gas.

Abruptly, and exactly one week after the protests began, they ended. The protesters – truck drivers and farmers, for the most part – said they were calling them off so as not to alienate the public. Because, remarkably, through the mounting chaos, most of the public had supported the protest. The feeling had taken root that the Labour government of Blair was ripping people off with the high gas taxes.

But with schools closing and hospitals cancelling all but emergency operations, the public’s mood might quickly have shifted. The government emerged from the confrontation insisting it would not change its fuel tax policy. What it is determined to change is the law so that, in future, it can force oil firms to deliver fuel if faced with similar protests. Blair and his advisers want to regain what in Soviet times were described as the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

If the onset of this crisis was a huge shock to Blair and his government, its aftermath has also produced a nasty shock. The Labour party’s lead in the opinion polls has suddenly vanished. To understand the depth of that shock you have to understand that Labour had led consistently in the polls for eight years. Three years ago that lead translated in a general election into the biggest parliamentary majority that the Labour party had ever achieved.

Even after that victory the opinion poll lead held and, in fact, grew. At one point just a month ago, Blair’s party was dominating the Opposition Conservatives by almost 20 points. And now, after just a week of protests, the lead has evaporated. It may only be a temporary aberration but it suggests that political loyalty is now just a shallow stream in an age where ideas and ideology have given way to image and marketing.

This week the image of Labour is atrocious and so its popularity has dived. Regaining the commanding heights of the poll numbers may prove a trickier task than that of ending a flash protest that all but froze the country in place.