It's Your Fault: How government gaslights its citizens

Our age of abundance is over, not because we are running out of anything but because our government has decided to make it that way. And, worse, the state is going to tell you it is your fault.

“Emergencies happen every day in the UK and across the world. They can be caused by severe weather or other natural hazards, by deliberate actions, or as a result of accidents or infrastructure failure. They can be events that happen quickly and are over in a few hours, or they can develop and continue over the course of several days, months, or sometimes even longer. 

Below are a few simple and effective steps that you should consider taking to prepare for emergencies and the disruption they cause.”

This is the UK government’s ‘Prepare’ website where they tell us to get ready for emergencies by stocking up on tinned foods, candles and batteries for when these emergencies occur. The website and the government, when pressed, tell us this is just good advice and they aren’t (in that somewhat overused term) ‘gaslighting’ the public into accepting power cuts, water rationing and fuel shortages. The whole tone of the Prevent website is, however, one of imminent apocalypse. You are directed to a downloadable ‘household emergency plan’ and given stern instructions to write down important numbers on pieces of paper, talk to your children and get together an emergency kit (which they describe at some length including a wind-up radio and torches because candles are a fire risk). 

We are, it seems, no longer in an age of abundance. Energy, water and food supply cannot be relied on so we must prepare ourselves for the inevitable moment when the lights go out, the Internet drops dead, and only brackish brown sludge comes out of the taps. The website doesn’t talk about zombies but it might as well have done. What on earth is going on? Why are we now being given this patronising ‘Be Prepared’ advice? Surely emergencies that result in this level of disruption are rare and unusual? And those people who live in more exposed or isolated areas are, most likely, very well prepared for bad weather and its associated problems.

After some discussion, Kathryn and I concluded that we weren’t being overly conspiratorial in having a view that the government is preparing us for the inevitable consequences of its own policies:

“The government has “war gamed” emergency plans to cope with energy blackouts lasting up to seven days in the event of a national power outage amid growing fears over security of supply this winter.

The Guardian has seen documents, marked “official sensitive”, which warn that in a “reasonable worst-case scenario” all sectors including transport, food and water supply, communications and energy could be “severely disrupted” for up to a week.”

The government knows that so-called ‘energy transition’ can only be achieved by 2035 with what euphemistically gets called ‘demand management’. Yet we are now in the midst of an election where the main opposition and likely government wants to achieve energy transition even more quickly. Yet government and opposition know that the 2035 deadline is impossible given current and projected levels of demand. It seems optimistic to argue that, if the majority of road transport is run on electricity rather than petrol or diesel, the demand for electricity will only increase by 50% by 2035. The UK’s National Grid makes the challenge clear: to meet net zero goals the proportion of fossil fuels used to generate electricity needs to fall from 84% to below 20% by 2050. Meanwhile demand for electricity in the UK is expected to double over the same period. So not only does the world need to replace existing supply with so-called ‘green’ energy but also 100% of new demand has to be met by that means.

While the electricity generators, distributors and grids all argue that they’ve got this covered and you won’t face repeated and longer power outages, the government and regulator plan on the expectation that brown-outs and power cuts make up an inevitable consequence of a below capacity grid that can’t grow fast enough to cope with the rising demand for electricity. None of this is a consequence of market pressures, geopolitics or war, all of this is a direct result of deliberately chosen government policies enforced on businesses and households by the state. Instead of being honest with us, however, the government, regulators, international agencies and parts of the generation and supply industry collude to tell us that this green transition will be smooth and that it will result in a more abundant and cheaper energy supply.

So why is the state and its agents speaking so much about ‘security’? Why is there a state-funded website telling us to behave like American survivalists and modern day ‘preppers’? Do we no longer live in that age of abundance, can we not expect thousands of different product lines and a glory of choice in our shops? Is the purpose of this passive-aggressive advice to prepare us for the inevitable shortages the drive for net zero implies? Or are we being softened up to accept that it is our selfish and greedy consumerism that is to blame for the power cuts, not the deliberate policies of our governments?

We can see how the last observation, that the state wants us to believe the problem is our fault, works by looking at how the British public has been gaslit over the years into believing that we need to protect the NHS and that the failings in healthcare aren’t that fault of that sainted service but are a consequence of our bad behaviour. We are told that the problems of the NHS (when not being blamed on insufficient money) are down to people smoking, drinking and eating too much. Our unhealthy lifestyles - or rather our neighbours unhealthy lifestyles - are costing the service billions. If we all only drank pure water and ate salad then granny would get her hip operation more quickly and nobody would die of cancer.

Hardly a day passes without another announcement of research showing that drinking, smoking or eating is costing the NHS untold billions. This steady stream has led to the public, and I suspect most politicians, really believing that the NHS is falling apart because of these supposed ‘public health’ problems. The reality is that, as all the NHS planners know but never say publicly, the failings of the system are down to crumbling infrastructure, an obsession with the general hospital and a growing number of old people with chronic health conditions. Granny isn’t the innocent victim here, granny is why the NHS can’t cope (or rather all the millions of grannies and grandpas).

The same tactic now applies to Net Zero. It isn’t just that you are being warned to prepare for power cuts but that every day new ‘research’ tells us just how our ordinary work-a-day lives are killing the planet. You can’t find a documentary that even glances at nature without an obligatory sermon about how climate change is making all this much worse. And that it is our fault. Our central heating, cars, barbecues, plastic bags, straws and consumption of 28-day aged rib-eye steaks. It isn’t government deciding to close down energy production before its replacement is available. It isn’t the state pretending that renewable energy is reliable and cheap while lying to us about how much that energy is subsidised. No it is us, the public, who are to blame.

I watched Ed Miliband, likely to be our next Secretary of State for Not Having Enough Power, interviewed on TV. At no point was Miliband asked about the economics of his plans. The statement that renewables mean cheaper energy wasn’t questioned, the claim that there will be more energy jobs and cheaper energy wasn’t laughed at, and Miliband was able to get away with calling anyone a ‘climate denier’ who even hints that maybe we should pause. As it stands, however, the truth is that there will be power cuts. There will be ‘demand management’ measures that amount to rationing. And there still won’t be enough electricity to power the country. Our age of abundance is over, not because we are running out of anything but because our government has decided to make it that way. And, worse, the state is going to tell you it is your fault.