The mood was angry as Andrew Spence, leader of the Jarrow convoy, clambered on top of the trailer and addressed a handful of drivers. Holding up a yellow piece of paper with a black square in the middle, he did not pull his punches.
'The police have said we have to put this on our windscreens. That to me is a Jewish star. That is the way I feel about it,' he said.
Harried by police and environmental protesters, the self-styled Jarrow crusade of about 30 vehicles, each bearing a yellow badge, yesterday trundled slowly through the rain across the North of England from Leeds to Manchester. They feel the country has turned against them, but are still determined to take their call for lower fuel prices to London.
'It is not the number of drivers that is important, it is the message we are carrying that matters,' said Mark Francis, a leader of the People's Fuel Lobby, which is behind the protest.
The drivers feel the police have discouraged people from joining the convoy and have treated them like pariahs. As Spence made his speech, a haulier shouted: 'This is a police state.'
'There is no intimidation. We want a peaceful protest,' said police spokesman Sergeant Francis Habgood.
But the police have a highly visible presence. They swarm around the protest in cars and on bikes. A police car, not a protest vehicle, sets the speed of the convoy. Officers have told the drivers that if they stray from their formation and attempt to block traffic they will be arrested and the convoy has been barred from going near the city centres of York, Leeds, Manchester and London. They must keep to main roads. Police cameras film the unlikely revolutionaries as they pass beneath motorway bridges, infuriating the protesters. 'Are we such a threat to Tony Blair? Are we really that dangerous?' fumed Spence.
At the moment they are not. But more drivers may join them as they head south through the Midlands, protesters claim. The convoy is still aiming for London, and even if they have to leave their vehicles outside London they are determined to have their day of protest at the heart of the capital. 'It doesn't matter how we get there, the last 25 miles will not be a problem. We will walk if we have to,' said John Coxon, one of the convoy's leaders.
According to Francis, London taxi drivers have offered to ferry protesters to Hyde Park from the police-designated parking areas. But it is all a far cry from the hundreds of trucks bringing chaos to London and jamming the M25 that the protesters originally hoped for.
Only days ago, the Government portrayed them as barbarians at the gate, threatening the country with a series of blockades of refineries and food depots. In reality the convoy has seemed to blend with the already heavy traffic on the road and segments towards the rear have become lost. On Friday one group ended up heading towards Hull before a flurry of mobile phone calls brought them back on to the correct path. Now the talk is of peaceful protest and a quiet dispersal after London.
Minor government concessions have contributed to the disappointment. Some would-be protesters may also have been deterred by fears that the public, already beset by flood and rail chaos, would not tolerate more disruption.
The convoy got off to an inauspicious start. The first group left Berwick on Thursday with just six vehicles. Only two, a cement mixer and a four-wheel-drive Toyota, arrived in Newcastle for the gaggle of television cameras. By Friday there were 70 trucks for the drive through Newcastle, but they included the eccentric as well as those genuinely threatened by the high cost of fuel.
One retired haulier was just there for the day. He had missed the September protests, he explained, because he was yachting in Spain. Elsewhere was a leather-clad biker on a Harley; another man brought an ageing school bus, and a farmer on a tractor hauled a load of manure on which had been spiked a blow-up plastic alien - apparently intended as a reference to Gordon Brown. 'We are going to London,' Spence told them all. 'It is London or bust for us, because a lot of us will be bust if things go on like they are.'
They were matched in number by protesters who were demanding an end to the convoy. Some were from Greenpeace, others from Friends of the Earth, and a group of elderly women were from Jarrow, outraged at the perceived hijacking of the name of the 1936 hunger march. 'Jarrow marched for need, not greed,' called one pensioner as a heavy lorry thundered by.
Police cars and bikes led the convoy and followed it. In Newcastle, hundreds more police held up traffic and ushered the convoy quickly over the Tyne and then back again.
No one went to Jarrow.
