British stoicism will make light of any dark days ahead
AS winter approaches, a new gospel of fear is spreading across the airwaves. On top of the economic turmoil, nuclear threats and surging prices, there are now warnings that Britain could face power cuts due to shortages in energy supplies, particularly of gas, which generates 40 per cent of our electricity.
It is a prospect that will reawaken memories of the 1970s, when the country was hit by regular blackouts in the wake of the Arab oil price shock abroad and major industrial action by the miners’ union.
At one stage in 1974, the nation had to be put on a threeday working week to conserve coal stocks. Evocative images show factories and pubs lit by oil lamps, office workers at their desks wrapped in blankets, and long queues to buy candles.
Some even enjoyed the drama, as one mother recalled of her children: “I can still see their small faces, smiling at the thought of having their meals as picnics in the sitting room and having their baths in a tin in front of the fire. They loved it.”
Despite the current mood of pessimism in some quarters, fuelled by concerns about the impact of the Ukrainian war on European energy supplies, the chances of return to the 1970s seem very low. Yesterday the Cabinet Office Minister Nadhim Zahawi said that because of contingency preparations it is “highly unlikely” that Britain will suffer power blackouts.
SIMILARLY, the National Grid believes that there will be sufficient capacity to avoid outages, partly because the potential emergency has led to the postponement of plans to close a number of power stations, as well as the reopening of the gigantic gas storage facility at Rough off the Yorkshire coast, shut in 2017.
At the same time, the National Grid argues that, in a crisis, demand could be cut by offering consumers a financial incentive to reduce their usage, a kind of voluntary rationing.
Even in the Grid’s worst-case scenario, the power cuts in Britain will last just three hours at a time, hardly a catastrophe in the context of modern history.
Nevertheless, the prediction of shutdowns has become another stick with which to beat Liz Truss’s battered government.
Such attacks are compounded by denunciations of the Prime Minister for her decision to block a £15million official campaign which would have provided advice to the public on how to save energy.
Again, this was a throwback to the 1970s, when the popular cook Delia Smith fronted a high-profile initiative called “Save it”, featuring the slogan “energy sense is common sense”. But Truss, one of whose core beliefs is a libertarian hostility towards the nanny state, refused to support the plan, though Downing Street also referred to fears that a tough campaign might make the elderly afraid to turn on their heating.
THE Prime Minister’s stance is justified. A propaganda drive like the one in the 1970s would have been patronising. In our consumerist society, where we are deluged with information across a vast range of platforms, official lectures about turning down the thermostat would have aggravated rather than assured. Moreover, environmental awareness is the secular religion of our times.
There is also the political angle. Approval of a campaign might have prompted some initial cheers from the virtuesignalling Opposition and commentariat, but soon ministers would find themselves in puritanical tests to judge their compliance with their own advice.
Some argue that such an advice campaign is necessary because the Government’s colossal rescue package on energy bills removes the pressure to cut usage.
But that is not entirely true, for the scheme provides relief rather than a freeze on prices, so it is still in the interests of consumers to be restrained. A more pertinent criticism is that the current problems are the result of a flawed energy policy that has put green dogma before the needs of the country.
In their obsession with meeting an arbitrary deadline for net zero carbon emissions, recent governments have leaned too much on unreliable renewables, too slow to develop a new generation of nuclear plants and too swift to abandon Britain’s large reserves of oil and gas.
Those failings are now being rectified by the Government. Even so, it would be wrong to exaggerate the suffering that would be caused by a few blackouts this winter.
As shown in numerous ordeals, from the Blitz to Covid, the British are an astonishing resilient people. Stoicism, not self-pitying hysteria, is in our national character.
‘A flawed energy policy has put green dogma before our needs’