he news fell like a bomb in the UK last Friday, with the announcement by the British energy regulator (OFGEM) that gas and electricity bills will jump by 80% in October. 80%! The maximum annual ceiling established by OFGEM for an average household was 1277 pounds (around $1950) in October 2021; over one year, it will have almost tripled by leaps and bounds next October, to 3,549 pounds.
The seriousness of the situation for households can hardly be overstated. Inflation hurts the wallet everywhere in the world and widens inequalities everywhere. However, among the G7 countries, the United Kingdom is the one where inflation is the most scathing: it was 10.1% in July (compared to 7.1% in Canada), and the Bank of England expects it to climb to 13% in the fall.
The crisis is such that an analysis by Danish bank Saxo says the country is “looking more and more like an emerging country” under the combined inflationary impact of Brexit and the pandemic. The NGO Child Poverty Action Group estimates that 15 million households (one in two) will be in a state of “energy poverty” next January – that is to say, they will struggle to pay their bills if the government does not do not adopt urgent aid measures.
Hence this impressive wind of union, worker and citizen revolt that has been blowing over the United Kingdom since June against the high cost of living and wages that are not keeping up. Wind of anger which is not without referring to the great strikes of the “winter of discontent” which had swept the country in 1979 or, more recently, to the collective exasperation expressed by the movement of “Yellow Vests” in France .
Such union mobilization has not been seen in the United Kingdom for decades: strike movement in the trains and the London Underground, which have followed in the footsteps of longshoremen and court-appointed lawyers. And then, walkouts expected at the start of the school year among teachers and perhaps even among nurses, who in the entire history of the country have never gone on strike.
In this context, a protest campaign called Enough is Enough was launched, largely inspired by trade unionist Mick Lynch of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). Politically singular character that Mr. Lynch, since he is a “Lexit”, namely a pro-Brexit on the left.
Enough is Enough has planned a large rally on Wednesday in central London, which will also include the tireless “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, hero of the American left.
The movement is largely the product of the vacuum left by the unfit Labor Party. Sanders, he is on a mission: to federate the American and British labor movements, which are far from being dissimilar: they were both broken in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Parallel to this resistance came an informal citizens’ movement called Don’t Pay UK., whose members publicly threaten not to pay their bills. Will they dare to do it? A fragile movement, no doubt, but which nevertheless testifies to the acute distress, with the approach of winter, of a large part of the population in the face of a Conservative government which remains, for the time being, absent subscribers.
Absent subscribers include, first and foremost, the resigning Boris Johnson, who, after having had fun with power, no longer takes important decisions, as if installed in the posture of the sulky. Then comes the one who will succeed her next week, Liz Truss, after being elected against her rival Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party – we will officially know on Monday – by high-caste activists whose profile is not very representative of the population. .
Far right, Mr Truss, the Foreign Secretary, said the solution to the crisis was not to give people money recklessly. This is how she lives.
If, then, the new government is expected to soon pledge billions of dollars in direct aid—how could it not, given the crisis? — , Mme Truss will obviously do so reluctantly. Apostle of Thatcherite ultra-liberalism, she swears by tax cuts and likes to say that the British must “work more”.
Sitting on the conservative majority won by Mr. Johnson in 2019, Truss practically holds power until 2024. What, then, will the next few years be made of?
Locked in a Brexit whose positive fallout is slow to be verified democratically and economically, London will also have to face at least two other major challenges: that of the referendum on independence that the Scottish government wants to hold in October 2023; and that, in the longer term, of the inexorable reunification of the two Irelands.
Under the Conservatives, the United Kingdom is not only tending to disunity: it is tending to shrink.