The new culture wars frontier? Heating your home

Maybe we should get bombed by the Luftwaffe to toughen us up a bit, or burn the furniture for warmth? My generation shouldn’t spout such contemptible nonsense about the olden days

Inevitably, the energy crisis has caused an inflation crisis, which has quickly morphed into a cost of living crisis, and now – ta-daaa – it has sparked a culture war. Of course it has. It’s how we do things now; thanks a bunch, Boris.

Edwina Currie, self-appointed shop steward for the boomer generation, has been on the telly telling the younger folk that people didn’t have central heating at all in her day, so they’re lucky. She’s suggesting that sticking some tin foil behind the radiator and moving the sofa will cut your heating bill to such an extent that you’ll be saved from destitution.

Martin Lewis, who understands these things, has his head in his hands as she’s doing her take on the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. Others suggest putting some woolly jumpers on to fight the cold, or advise the young to embrace thermal undies to survive – “long johns” as they used to be called. It won’t help anyone with a respiratory condition, but there we are.

It is mad and dangerous, but like many dangerously mad ideas, there is some ineradicable element of truth at the centre of it. Central heating is a new thing in this country – that is, comparatively speaking – in the perspective of past generations. Indeed, as we will soon learn with the advent of heat pumps, our Victorian housing stock was designed to be warmed by cheap coal extravagantly burned in every fireplace, and these draughty old underinsulated places aren’t well suited to central heating anyway.

It’s true that the concept of a lovely warm radiator in every room was a revelation to many of us. They didn’t have it in houses round my way when I was a kid. Forgive the nostalgic trip down near-poverty lane, but we had a coal grate and then a gas fire in the living room, and, erm, that was it. The pre-radiator, pre-duvet age meant a bed piled so high with heavy woollen blankets you’d experience the same kind of pressure on your body as a deep-sea diver in the Mariana Trench.

We didn’t get running hot water, either, until the 1970s, and we made do with an outside loo until my teenage years – again, this was all perfectly normal. The Daily Mirror served the same function as Cushelle. There was a tin bath, which we attempted to fill up with cauldrons of hot water from the stove before the first batch got cold. No phone, no car, no avocados. We was poor, but we was happy.

Well, actually, more like “poor, but filled with revolutionary fervour and a burning resentment about societal injustice” as soon as I was a bit older and realised that this wasn’t at all normal for those who lived in the big houses down the road. But it is perfectly true that we could all go back to living a bit more like people did in that earlier age: selling the car and TV,  ditching the mobile phone, turning the radiators off in every room bar one, and doing without running hot water. I’d draw the line at installing an outside toilet, though, mainly because it wouldn’t save any money. If you have to do certain things to survive, then you will.

And, by the way, the wartime generation had it even harder, and the ones who struggled through the Hungry Thirties suffered even worse malnourishment. I always contemplate their lives, I have to say, when I hear the phrase “intergenerational inequalities”. Liz Truss, in a faint echo, cheerfully points out that previous generations of the British “have been through worse”.

But so what, really? Maybe we should get bombed by the Luftwaffe to toughen us up a bit? Turn the UK into a subsistence economy? Dig the garden up and plant cabbages and carrots? Live on potatoes? Do our own dentistry at home (already happening)? Burn the furniture for warmth? Pawn the wedding ring? Bring back rickets?

In other words, do we want to normalise poverty? Because this is the world that Edwina Currie grew up in – and it is one that many Conservatives would welcome back with equanimity. It’s cruel and it’s bogus.

There isn’t actually anything sensible most families can do to make ends meet if the fuel bills are going to exceed their disposable income. There are many families who have never been profligate, and don’t spend any spare cash on fags, booze and lottery cards (and even if they did, it would just be a symptom of personal nihilistic desperation, itself a form of mental illness).

Vulnerable people can’t make ends meet with energy-saving top tips they might read in a newspaper. We can no longer shop around for the best deal. Price comparison sites are all redundant. People can’t get by even if they make their lives miserable by trying to live in one room and self-disconnecting their electricity supply.

My generation, and those who are older, shouldn’t spout such contemptible nonsense about the olden days. And nor should misguided people in their twenties on comfortable incomes or of private means deride those struggling to subsist with comments about donning an extra cardigan. But that seems to be what’s happening – another culture war fought for the sake of it.

What lies beneath Currie’s intervention and its like is the old, old idea of the feckless, “undeserving” poor, who should be blamed for their own plight and don’t deserve central heating. Even if any of that were true, it’s irrelevant. It’s nothing to do with the victims.

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The truth is that our electricity and gas bills are now ridiculously unaffordable because Vladimir Putin started a war in Ukraine, which swiftly led to a global shortage of energy. We in the free world sanctioned him by not buying his oil and gas, and then he sanctioned us by not selling us his oil and gas. So the prices, set by world markets, soared. It’s got nothing to do with green levies, net zero, or the ban on fracking.

That’s the context that politicians really need to be honest with people about, because the effort to keep fuel bills down is going to cost the British state a huge amount of money, and we may not to be able to borrow that sort of sum indefinitely. Boris Johnson, to be fair, did point out the other day that the Ukrainians are paying in blood, which is another way of looking at it, but I’m not sure the message has sunk in.

Unless Truss’s Britain, as we must now learn to call it, is a place where mass destitution, homelessness and malnutrition are accepted as the natural order, then we should get a bit more serious about preventing this impending and continuing disaster. We also need to find a way to make sure we can do so sustainably, ie for as long as the war in Ukraine lasts. If gas and electricity prices eventually stabilise at some high level, indefinitely, then we also need to find some way of spreading the burden, so that everyday life is sustainable for all of us on a permanent basis.

There’s a rumour that Truss wants to keep bills frozen until the next election. But then what? Gas and electricity are now essentials, whatever things were like when Edwina was a girl, but both are now priced as luxuries. It is not a “spike”, and everything will not be back to normal by this time next year. Truss doesn’t just have to solve it for this winter, but potentially for every winter for many years to come. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to move the sofa.