The wave of fuel-price protests sweeping through Europe regained momentum yesterday after a weekend lull, while governments scrambled to limit the political fallout.
Yesterday's protests centred on Scandinavia, but blockades sprang up at the Spanish port of Barcelona and in Slovenia, while Israeli truckers threatened to stage their own demonstrations from today.
In Norway demonstrators blocked 11 oil terminals at key ports along the south and west coasts, although they later called off their protest under the threat of police action.
Norway, the second-biggest oil exporter in the world behind Saudi Arabia, escaped the first days of protests even though it has some of the highest petrol and diesel prices.
Yesterday, however, hundreds of truckers blocked terminals in Oslo, Fredrikstad, Toensberg and Stavanger, all on the southern coast, and two terminals at the Mongstad oil refinery near Bergen in west Norway.
The hauliers announced the blockade last week after the Finance Minister refused to promise fuel tax cuts in a draft 2001 budget.
In Sweden truckers and farmers partially blockaded southern ports and ferries yesterday in protest at a planned increase in the tax on diesel fuel.
The truckers confined ferry blockades to trucks carrying non-urgent goods.
Vehicles with medicine or perishable food, private cars and tourist buses were allowed through. Spanish fishermen, meanwhile, sealed off Barcelona's port and truckers laid siege to fuel distribution points in the centre of the country.
Two large cruising vessels were stopped just outside the port, and around 200 fishing boats were unable to set out for their daily catch, officials said.
In the central region of Castille and Leon, the main grain-producing region in Spain, farmers blocked at least three fuel distribution points, State radio said.
In Britain, where fuel supplies were gradually returning to normal after last week's blockades, the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, was assessing the political damage.
The Conservative leader, Mr William Hague, called the protests "a genuine taxpayers' revolt" and said tax was now "the hottest domestic political issue" facing Britain.
A weekend poll put the Conservatives ahead of Labour for the first time in eight years after the protests prompted a shortage of fuel and supplies not seen in Britain since the 1970s.
The government will ask oil companies to sign a memorandum of understanding formalising their duty to deliver fuel in the event of attempted disruptions to supply, a spokesman for Mr Blair said yesterday.