It seems to me that most people who wax nostalgic about the 1970s were either very young, or not even born during that decade. I became a teenager in the early 1970s, so I was insulated by my parents from a lot of the problems the country faced then, but I know that Mum and Dad had many struggles.
With inflation in double digits and a litre of diesel costing nearly £2, with prices of gas and electricity soaring, supermarkets putting security tags on everyday items like cheese, and Sainsburys charging £7 for a box of fish fingers, there’s no denying that we are currently experiencing a cost of living crisis.
Add in some industrial unrest on the railways and at Royal Mail, the searingly hot weather we had in July that was even more extreme than 1976, water shortages, hosepipe bans and sewage dumped into the sea and anyone looking back with fondness at the 1970s has recently had the opportunity to experience much of what that decade was like. All we need is Abba to hit number one with a re-release of Dancing Queen (it was number one for six weeks in September/October 1976) and we really will be back there. The prospects are that winter 2022-23 will top anything that the 1970s produced in terms of awfulness.
We are told that this winter, pensioners and others on low incomes will have to choose between eating and heating. This is nothing new; back in 2012, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries tweeted that very sentiment.[2] Pretty soon, the eating v heating dilemma will be one faced not just by pensioners, but by many people who have never had to face it in the past.
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According to Chancellor of The Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi, even
those earning £45,000 a year will struggle as energy bills go up by an
anticipated 80% this year, and even more in 2023. For once, a Tory politician
is not suggesting that if people cannot pay their bills they should simply get
a better paid job, perhaps realising this time, that that is not a realistic solution.
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Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi admits that even those earning £45,000 will struggle with their energy bills. Fortunately for him, MP's can claim heating costs for second homes on expenses, and can even try to pay to heat their stables at the public's expense. |
If an annual income of £45,000 is not enough to keep people
from struggling, how will pensioners survive? The full rate of the current State
Pension is £185.15 per week, or £9,627.80 per year. The predicted gas and
electricity price increases suggest that even if the annual pension goes up to
£10,600 in 2023 as is expected, pensioners could be left with as little as £10.92
a day for food, transport and other essential living costs. Essentials include
Council Tax bills, and if we assume a bill of £1,500 then that leaves only £6.80
per day for food and other living costs; a Council Tax bill of £2,000 leaves
just £5.43 per day for everything else.
What is the answer? I’m sure I don’t have one. Money saving guru Martin Lewis (below) doesn’t have one; he said in an interview recently, “There is NO cutting back. There is NO Money Saving Expert. You could put me into one of those households and do every trick in the book and I wouldn't even get close to scratching the sides of what is needed.”
Some people seem to think that they have are answers,
although they are not especially useful ones. Baroness Hoey – formerly plain
Kate Hoey, once Labour MP for Vauxhall - said, “Those of us brought up
before central heating wore extra jumpers when winter came.” A lot to unpack
in those fourteen words. I was brought up in a house that had neither central
heating nor double glazing. The metal framed windows would be covered in ice on
the inside on winter mornings. Neither our bathroom nor separate toilet had any
heating at all. I often wore nearly as many clothes in bed as I wore when I
went out, my dad never slept without a woolly hat on, and the winter cold
triggered my Mum’s neuralgia. Waking up, exhaling, and seeing your breath
condense is not a pleasant experience, and one not solved by putting an extra
jumper on.
There’s a tweet from Sandy, a Conservative (naturally), who Thanks Boris (again, naturally) and says that they didn’t have double glazing or central heating in the 1960s but are still here. They didn’t have energy bills that represented over 60% of their income either.
People – if indeed they are real people, and not bots – who tweet this sort of stuff presumably think that just surviving is all we should aspire to. Perhaps they think sending barefoot young children to work in factories, up chimneys and down mines would also be acceptable today because the Victorians did it. They’d probably consider it character building.
Ominously, a lot of businesses have been tweeting their expected energy bills for the coming year. This from The Rose & Crown pub, is frightening. The number of businesses that could go under in the coming months is very scary indeed. And when businesses go bust, people lose their jobs, and when people lose their jobs they will struggle even more to meet their food and energy bills.
The Daily Mail has a competition to win your energy bills paid for a year, energy company Ovo suggest doing star jumps and cuddling our pets to keep warm (assuming you can afford to keep a pet), while This Morning’s consumer expert Alice Beer suggests saving money by eating mouldy food rather than throwing it away. All of these, plus the idea that we should not be squeamish about drinking sewage water speak of a country that simply has given up.
Now I agree that in this country we throw away a lot of food
that is perfectly edible, but Alice Beer’s advice is potentially dangerous. The
Food Standards Agency says, “while it is possible that removing
the mould and a significant amount of the surrounding product could remove any
unseen toxins that are present, there is no guarantee that doing so would
remove them all”.
There’s a saying that if I owe my bank £1,000 I have a problem, but if I owe them £1,000,000 they have a problem. Similarly, if I owe my energy supplier £1,000 then I have a problem and will be disconnected if I can’t pay, but if the 28 million households in the UK each owe their energy suppliers £1,000 then can they cut all of them off? Probably not, but they can – and will – continue putting prices up.
Perhaps our prospective Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has the answer.
Winter is coming. Put another jumper on.
[1]
See https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-1970s-part-one-decade-that-style.html
[2] In 2012 Dorries was not yet Culture Secretary. That year she had the Conservative whip removed after appearing on the TV show, “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.” Some of the recent tweets attributed to her appear to have been faked, but whether or not this is a real one, the eating v heating dilemma has been a real one for many people for many years.
