There Is A Reason Energy Bills Are So High

The great Ricky D. Hale writes:

Now I’m going to reveal my age here, but I remember my teenage days when I played a pirated copy of ISS Pro Evolution on a chipped PS1 at my cousin’s house.

Those games could certainly get heated and every now and then, often near the end of a tight match that was maybe 2-2, when one of us was racing down the pitch, determined to score the winner, the TV screen would go blank. The PlayStation would hum as it powered down and my cousin’s mam would yell upstairs that the bloody electricity had run out again. You can imagine how infuriating this was.

Now there is a huge section of the population who have no concept of electricity just running out: for them it’s basically in unlimited supply and so it should be, given how essential it is to our everyday lives, but that essential utility they’ve always taken for granted has been a luxury for many.

I remember my cousin’s mam panicking when she realised there was no emergency credit on the meter, then scrambling around the house (possibly in the dark, depending on the time) to see if she could scrape together a fiver. If she could, she would send me and my cousin along to the local garage to buy some credit for the electricity key

The garage was about a mile away, the local newsagents did not sell gas and electricity, and we had no bus service or fare, so we were walking there and back, no matter the weather, unless we wanted to sit in the dark all night.

When you’re working-class, it’s not just that everything is more expensive for you, it’s also a damn sight more inconvenient. If your power goes off and you’ve got no money, it’s not just that you’re sitting in the cold and dark, it’s that the food in your fridge or freezer is going off so you’d better eat it quickly and then go hungry until you next get paid.

You want to do some housework in the meantime? Well, I’m afraid your vacuum cleaner is not going to work. You want to wash your clothes? Well, you’re going to be handwashing them in cold water in the kitchen sink. Oh and be sure to enjoy your daily cold bath, will you?

You’re poor so perhaps you don’t have much food to preserve, and you’re used to cutting mould off cheese before taking the risk of eating it. But perhaps you’re a parent who was buying 2-for-1s in bulk to ensure you had enough to feed your kids for the rest of the month. Well, you’d better find some money for credit fast, otherwise that food is not going to last you.

That’s the reality that idiots like 30p Lee don’t understand: it’s not just about the cost of these things, but how they connect to one another.

You can buy all the cheap meals you want, but if your gas goes out, that means you cannot use the cooker. If your electricity goes out, you cannot even use the microwave. At that point, how do you eat your frozen chicken legs which have started to thaw? Do you become palaeolithic and build a bonfire in your garden, assuming you have one? Do you knock on the neighbour’s door and ask them to cook for you? It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

Poverty is a complex reality that I’m only scratching the surface of here, and it’s something those who love to lecture us have no experience of.

It always seemed weird to me that my cousins were forced to have a prepayment meter, and that the energy company thought it was appropriate to do this to a family with children, but this is the insidious side of capitalism.

Capitalism loves to punish poor people.

It’s not just the additional charge for electricity that you pay when you have a prepayment meter, it’s also things like bank charges that really kick you when you’re down. I remember when my bank took £35 from me when I was on £40 a week Jobseeker’s Allowance and as a result, I fell into a spiral of charges.

My point is it’s not just the energy companies that circle us like sharks, it’s the landlords, the banks, the DWP, even the entertainment companies like Netflix who keep trying to squeeze a few more quid out of people enjoying one tiny luxury they can still afford. Everyone is wanting more than we physically have and while Netflix seems petty in the grand scheme of things, it’s all connected. It’s about how our psychological needs are every bit as important as our physical needs, and none are being met.

In my early twenties, I was staying in my uncle’s flat in the west end of Newcastle and for the last three days, we didn’t have any power. Unless you’re poor, I’m going to assume you’ve never had the joy of spending three days without power in a nice place, let alone a place that smelled like an unflushed toilet where you could see tiny bugs crawling in the carpet. Three days in the cold and dark, staring at the nicotine-coated walls, slowly losing your sanity because you have nothing to fill the emptiness of those days is a special kind of torment. Most prison cells would be nicer.

I could drone on and on about how miserable the poverty was and how difficult the lack of power made things, but I suspect you’re getting the picture, and the point of this article is not to throw a pity party, it’s to highlight just how predatory our capitalist system has become: a system where bailiffs get bonuses based on how many prepayment meters they install, breaking the rules to break into homes while people are at work and not bothering to let them know.

Do you have any idea what an intrusion that is? Do you have any idea how unnerving it feels to have another person invade your home? I don’t care whether the burglar is a local addict looking for drug money or a bailiff with a court warrant, the principle is the same: people are breaking into your home to take money from you.

And in the case of the bailiff, it’s even worse.

The bailiff is not doing this out of desperation, they’re doing it to earn a juicy bonus and boost the profits of a company that has already seen its profits go through the roof. If you spend a little time thinking about this, it’s not hard to see who the real criminals are. And you have to ask when society decided that burgling people’s homes was an acceptable thing to do. People are being punished for being too poor to afford bills that should never have gone so high in the first place, they’re being charged for the privilege of having the bailiff break into their home, and then, to add insult to injury, charged a higher rate on their prepayment meter.

And it somehow gets even worse: not everyone who is on a prepayment meter has even fallen behind on their bills. When my wife and I moved into our first place together, it was a private tenancy on a house with a prepayment meter. We had not fallen behind on our bills and yet we had no way of getting the meter removed, therefore we were forced to pay higher rates for no reason. It was tough shit.

Ofgem may finally be investigating the installation of prepayment meters, but in an ethical system, they would never have been allowed in the first place and the only proper response would be to ban them outright. Cutting off people’s electricity is no more acceptable than cutting off their water supply.

Energy bills are likely to rise by another 40% in April when government support ends and the energy price cap rises again, dragging 40% of the country into fuel poverty. The installation of prepayment meters has been suspended because measures like this were only ever intended to punish the poorest.

In a weird way, I’m almost glad the lower middle class is feeling the pinch, not because I want them to struggle (I don’t want anyone to struggle), but because I want more of them to show solidarity with us. That’s the only way we win something resembling a solar-powered utopia where the essentials are guaranteed and our children can play their videogames in peace.

Food should be a human right.

Energy should be a human right.

Housing should be a human right.

It’s only when those things become unaffordable luxuries to you that you can truly appreciate the injustice in our system. One thing you need to understand is inflation was never really about an unfortunate market situation, nor was it about the Ukraine war, and it was not even about corporate greed, although that clearly played a major role.

More than anything else, inflation was about disciplining the working class, about telling us they can make our lives harder at any time, that things can never be better than they were before, and that when things finally go back to the way they were, we should bloody well be grateful. The ruling class are reminding us that by controlling our economy, they control the quality of our lives. It’s about time we started asking ourselves why we gave so much power to these people and how we can take it back.