I remember the last petrol crisis, in 2000, although when I say “remember” I mean I was there – I have very clear visuals of sitting on the top deck of a 52 bus, wondering why people minded so much when it was only petrol and they could, after all, get a bus.

It started with some disgruntled farmers and hauliers, angry not so much at the raw price of petrol as at the fuel duty. As vexing as they were, there was something quite magnificent about their success. All they had to do was blockade a refinery for a few hours. It didn’t even matter when the police moved them on. Copycat blockades sprung up all over the place. This was marginally harder then than it would be today, since the crossover between “people who own a tractor” and “people who know how to use Google” was nowhere near as large. It transpired that many hauliers could locate their local refinery using a map.

I dearly long for a time when I don’t have to read or write the phrases “supply chains” or “just-in-time” ever again, but – here we go – just-in-time supply chains mean that even a minor blockade will cause a major shortage, which will bring all the boys immediately to the yard, only when I say “boys” I mean “people with cars” and when I say “yard” I mean “the local Esso”.

Tony Blair’s government was thought to be on the brink of collapse back then: the chaos wreaked upon ordinary lives was considered only secondary to the catastrophic breakdown in trust. If the government has told everyone not to panic, yet people are panicking anyway, what does that spell for democracy? Surely, it is at its 11th hour? Ha, back in 2000, we didn’t know we were born.

Here’s the thing: I was 27 during the last crisis and had been actively trying to disrupt the warp and weft of society for at least 20 years. It wasn’t always my own idea. Probably not until the poll tax riots of 1990 did I engage in civil disobedience without first having to be bribed. I went to Greenham Common for some liquorice allsorts. Nonetheless, even against my will, I had built up a body of experience that pointed in one direction: it is not hard to annoy people. Coordinated action can annoy a lot of people, many of them not inconvenienced in any way, just annoyed at the idea of you. But if society is a horse, all the assembled protesters on any given issue – from nuclear warheads to foreign invasions, from student fees to the idiocy of Brexit – are one single fly, buzzing round its eyes.

Contrast this, if you will, with 12 angry men in command of articulated vehicles. The horse is now on its knees, with no idea how to get back up.

The militant farmers’ movement of 2000 apparently took its inspiration from France, where they blockade things with their ginormous wheels all the time. I rarely agree with angry British farmers, since even when they are right – protesting rapacious supermarkets or hedgerow decline, for instance – they always manage to crowbar in an objectionable secondary agenda, such as foxhunting or a flat tax. I have never managed to get on top of the political long game of French hauliers. But I hold all of them in very high regard, for protesting so much less often than the rest of us, but being so much better at it.

Today’s petrol shortages have nothing to do with blockades, but that doesn’t mean the people with the lorries aren’t angry: the pig industry is amassed outside the Tory conference as I write. They have, it pains me to say, drawn all their lessons on protest from the left – they have come dressed as pigs, carrying banners with pictures of tractors – and none from the right. They should have brought their pigs, as well as their tractors, and they could have had all the impact of a blockade, plus the arresting carnival of a bunch of pigs. Maybe they know all this. Maybe they just couldn’t find the petrol.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist