There are a number of golden rules in life but perhaps the most important is this: you don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.

Only when one understands this basic truth can one hope to understand the way the world will, should, does and can only ever work.

The response to the Shell tanker drivers' strike is just the latest example of otherwise intelligent people not yet grasping this fundamental point. Usually it's over nurses' pay - they deserve more - or footballers' - they deserve less. Now, somewhat bizarrely, it's tanker drivers. The unions say the drivers who deliver to Shell earn £32,000 a year. The employers say it's £36,000. Lots of people say the drivers earn enough and shouldn't be striking for more. I say: what's it got to do with you?

The contracts between the drivers and their employers are a private affair and it is no business of mine or anyone else how much the drivers earn, any more than it's my business whether you think £6 for an omelette and chips is good value or a rip off. It's between you and the café.

The nature of a market is that one party offers a good or service and either agrees a mutually acceptable price with another party or they go their separate ways. And that's all there is to it.

If the tanker drivers are not happy with the price they are paid, they have every right to try to negotiate a pay rise. And if one tactic they choose to use as part of that negotiation is to withdraw their labour, that's up to them, just as it's up to the employers how they react to the strike.

It has nothing to do with anyone else - and certainly not the Government, which is why it is wrong for George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, to hint, as he did during the Grangemouth dispute in April, that a future Conservative government would legislate to make more difficult strikes that inconvenience the public. Governments have no business intervening in private contractual disputes.

Because just as it's right for government to legislate against secondary strike action, to prevent unions and workers from intervening in disputes which have nothing to do with them, so it's wrong for government to intervene in private contractual disputes between employees and employers.

Yes, it's inconvenient if Shell's stations run out of petrol, but the market takes care of that by providing an incentive on both parties to settle - lost pay and lost revenue. It might take another day, another week, another month or any other period. But eventually - as there was in Grangemouth - there will be a settlement that works for both parties. That's how the market works.

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