Failing at the basics

By Pete North - September 17, 2021

Soaring gas prices have forced two industrial sites in the north of England to close as fears grow of a winter energy crisis. Factors include weak gas stocks after a cold end to the last winter, poor wind power generation levels in recent months and supply chain disruption to deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) because of the Covid crisis. Meanwhile, National Grid was forced to turn to coal-fired power stations at short notice to keep the lights on earlier this month while a fire at a power link between France and the UK has damaged capacity further and contributed to rising wholesale gas and electricity costs. The interconnector could be out of action well into next year.

The bottom line is that the UK is looking at eyewatering bills for the foreseeable future, and if we have a particularly harsh winter and anything else goes wrong, then there is a very serious risk of blackouts.

Anyone who takes an interest in these such affairs knows that this situation has been at least a decade in the making, and we were predicting this as far back as 2007. We’d already left it too late to bring new nuclear baseload online and the gaps were being plugged with gas turbines – which at the very least can be built relatively quickly and can respond rapidly to grid imbalances. If you have a steady supply of gas, that is.

Fears of outages are usually dismissed as hyperbole, and each time we narrowly avoid the kind of blackouts many anticipate. But it’s more by luck than by having a functioning energy policy – and though we continue to be lucky, we’re paying through the nose for it. As prices rise it will amount to a very serious loss of income for hard pressed households amidst rising inflation in other areas.

Making matters worse is the complete inability of this government to get a grip on immigration, adding further demand to the tune of a small town every year – for which we have no houses, insufficient water and sewerage capacity and when transport infrastructure is maxed out. Once you heap on welfare cuts, NHS waiting lists, the care home crisis, tax increases followed by Council Tax increases, we’re heading for the perfect storm of discontent.

This is not run of the mill maladministration. Even the Johnson administration at its worst couldn’t screw things up as much as this in the space of a term. This is the culmination of systemic policy neglect in every area of importance. I’ve heard it said that when everything is a crisis then nothing is, but when every key policy area is on the brink of collapse, it suggests we’re headed toward Greek levels of dysfunction where public officials have to be bribed to get anything done. Good government has been dying a slow death over the last thirty years, but now it’s becoming impossible to ignore.

If there is one outright benefit to Brexit then it is the degree to which it has exposed the institutional rot in the Westminster system and the imbalances in the economy, sustained by short termism and convenience. Our sudden death departure from the single market combined with the global turmoil brought on by Covid, reveals a status quo that was very much living on borrowed time. But while we’re all aware of it, much of it barely registers with our political class who have yet to recognise the scale of the change and the gravity of what is upon us. We need radical and urgent action across the board but it’s not on offer from anyone.

In a time of great uncertainty, the one thing I am certain of is that society can no longer withstand the inadequacy of its politics. Our cities are becoming increasingly lawless as feral immigrants ramp up the violence to unprecedented levels, the justice system has collapsed and the police are no longer capable of securing public trust or keeping order. We pay taxes for basic services but they no longer exist or in a state of such disarray and intellectual decline that they’re actively working against the public interest. Paying tax is now self harm.

Worse still, it’s not as though voting presents any solution. We can go through the motions of voting for a protest party, but we’re still lumbered with an archaic representative democracy. Participation on any level is increasingly meaningless. Social media algorithms are now essentially social credit systems where low status opinions simply do not get an airing. We can take to Twitter and Facebook to register our displeasure but the politicians aren’t listening and “transmit-only” journalists aren’t listening either. The public debate doesn’t influence anything. The 2016 referendum was probably the first and last meaningful expression of democracy in my lifetime.

This week we had a cabinet reshuffle and though these are usually of minuscule importance, this one couldn’t matter less. There is no talent in the Tory party. It is an empty husk. This government has gone off the rails and will accomplish nothing. Johnson is more concerned with what the press thinks of him and appeasing his whore. British politics has entered its terminal phase. Civil society is only secure for as long as the basics are working on autopilot. When the lights start to flicker out and we see real shortages in the supermarket, the public might start finally do something about it. And it won’t be pretty.