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I know people don’t like to admit they made mistakes, but it’s very weird to see the reaction to the upcoming (I mean it already exists, but it’s about to get worse and then worse still and then even worse) energy crisis is to not suggest that some mistakes may have been made for us to arrive at this point, but instead to say that we had ice on the inside of our windows in the old days and we got through it OK. I remember ice on the inside of the windows too, but it was less to do with people saving money by not having the heating on and more to do with heating being so rubbish that you all had to huddle round the electric bar fire which didn’t reach the windows! I suspect if we’d had ice on our windows and couldn’t have afforded to run those comparatively wasteful devices that not as many of us would have survived. Also anyone who remembers those days would have been a maximum of about 35 at that time, so yeah, they might have survived it. The old people wouldn’t be alive today even if they hadn’t frozen to death back then. Which they probably did. You were five. You probably believed it when your mum said your gran had gone to live on a farm.
Even if there was no heat then and we somehow got through it, it’s odd to be nostalgic for those times, rather than pleased we managed to get to a point, for several decades where the vast majority of people could afford to have some hot water and put the radiators on. Rather than herald the arrival of a time when the majority of us are worried about whether we can afford to do that any more. What would have to happen for these people to step back and say, oh no, this isn’t good enough is it? Why haven’t we done more to prepare for this? You wouldn’t even have to fully blame the current government (if you were really attached to those blinkers) as we could have started moving the country to energy self-sufficiency much sooner.
Are you really going to listen to the people trying to offer solutions to how we should cope with this, like wearing our coats and making muffs out of our pets, rather than looking for who is to blame or finding more long term solutions. As we’re almost on a war footing (and things might go more literally in that direction) might a short term nationalisation of energy work? Or at least the privatised companies agree that for a couple of years they’ll only aim to cover their costs. And then they can go back to making billions of pounds each year when we’re over this hump. I know, I hate to think of them having to fall back on the billions of pounds they’ve made over the last few decades and only get more billions in 2024 and every fibre of my being thinks that everyone’s gran dying instead is a small price to pay. Do you really want to live in a world where our energy and health services can’t be monetised and for the profits to go to people with unimaginable wealth?
For most of the last decade I have been reminded of the last few days for the Russian monarchy and the disconnect between rich and poor. In pre-revolutionary Russia the poor were ridiculously poor (but they had no central heating and largely got by, right?) and still remained loyal to the Tsars for much longer than you could have ever anticipated, but the rich really didn’t seem to see their fate coming. Even though there were so few of them and so many poor people. I never thought we’d actually get to the point where huge numbers of people in our country were so poor that they couldn’t get food or thought that they might freeze to death, but the rich seem keen to keep pushing things until that happens. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I stopped studying Russian history at the point where Rasputin dies, so I am assuming it all turned out OK for the Romanovs and they’re still on the throne to this day.
And all those aristocrats are alive and well and not shot or anything. So don’t worry people tweeting your advice on how to cope with no electricity or gas. I can’t imagine anyone will remember what you said when things go a bit Pete Tong. Or should that be a bit Tim Westwood?
