POWER CUTS

“No society is more than three meals away from revolution.” 

This saying is generally attributed to Vladimir Lenin – though probably erroneously – when he was tub thumping before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and I was reminded of it when we had a power cut in our village a few days ago. The ‘outage’ (I just love that American term) lasted for five hours and was very annoying. We have no gas supply where we live (we don’t have any street lighting either, but that’s another matter); we exist solely on our electricity supply. No television, no lighting, no heating, no cooking, no internet connection…. we couldn’t even boil a kettle for a cup of tea. Actually, there was a funny side to this. We were only aware of power being restored when our kettle started to sing. Obviously, I had switched it on at the precise moment that we were being switched off. It quite startled me until I realised what was going on. The cause of the ‘outage’? No, not Putin, nor the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, but a swan, which had flown into a power line and decapitated itself as well as decapitating our electricity supply. Which was ironic really, as we live in Hanley Swan. They

mate for life, my wife tells me, so one swan swan hereabouts is set for a lonely existence. 

But an occurrence like that does set you thinking about the fragility of our modern world. How long could we really exist before the food starts to run out? In fact, I think old Vlad was over-egging it a bit. There are more than three meals in our pantry and enough food to feed an army in our two-and-a-half freezers, though of course all that frozen food would soon have gone off once the electricity supply had been cut. More realistically, an American investigative journalist, Alfred Henry Lewis, came up with the notion in 1906 that in any society there are around nine meals between mankind and anarchy. That sounds about right to me. I reckon there are about nine meals in our house before I would have to sally forth with my spade from the garden shed to smash the windows of our local corner shop to help myself to some canned products and possibly a few Kit-Kats. More than likely, that dodgy family from one of the new homes in the area would have got there first.

Imagine if the other Vlad, the more recent one, had sabotaged our energy sources, our supply lines, our undersea cables, our communication satellites, how long would it be before law and order breaks down and simple civic courtesies fly out of the window? My child is hungry and that loaf of bread you’re carrying, mate, I need it, so hand it over, pronto, before I hit you over the head with this spade. Apparently, this danger was laid bare in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina which struck New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005. It has been calculated that 1,392 people were killed and the damage estimated at 125 billion dollars. Residents in the city started looting stores in search of food and water. There were carjacks, murders, thefts and rapes throughout New Orleans. Prisoners were left to die in their cells as prison officers abandoned them to seek shelter.

Scenes of looting in New Orleans following the hurricane that struck in 2005 

It does not take a huge leap of the imagination to see the same scenes of disorder and lawlessness breaking out in British cities when Armageddon strikes, though here in Hanley Swan, we have no gaol – as far as I know – and no prisoners to be abandoned by their gaolers. 

The brittleness of our modern society arises from our economies being run on a ‘just-in-time’ basis, where a loaf of bread arrives on our supermarket shelf roughly 48 hours before it is bought. The widget for our electrical gadget arrives in the factory the evening before it is due to be applied. The doomsday scenario is not difficult to write. If there is no fuel because the Strait of Hormuz, say, has been closed, the delivery trucks cannot run, food stocks run low and finally run out and people begin to starve. If the electricity has been cut off, we would have no power to do anything because we forgot to replace our old nuclear power stations and for some reason the wind has stopped blowing for three months. We think it could never happen, not here in Merrie England, isolated from Third World Countries and their problems, but that power cut told me that it could. God forbid it just might, if the unimaginable happens. 

How long would it be before our supermarket shelves were stripped of foodstuffs?

Well, let us imagine the unimaginable. Once the nine meals have been eaten, what then? Presumably, we would be experiencing enough hunger to begin fearing for our lives and those of our children, and we have to ask ourselves to what lengths we would go to keep our family alive. The inescapable fact is that we have been dependent on people hundreds, even thousands, of miles away to provide us with food. Our ancestors would have been appalled at our poor planning and inability to provide for ourselves.

The delivery lorries have stopped moving because of a lack of fuel. Everybody would start to worry and soon the supermarket shelves would have been stripped bare of food. By the time we have consumed Meal 6, we would be in a state of panic and then after Meal 9 hunger kicks in. How long before we would be stealing from our neighbours? Or looting? Law and order would start to break down, and the streets to descend into chaos. As we saw in the Covid epidemic and in several fuel crises spawning riots of recent years, potential civil disorder and social upheaval are never far away. The ‘just-in-time’ supply system becomes highly unstable very quickly.

To go back to that original observation by the American journalist, Alfred Henry Lewis, in 1906, it might be worth quoting in full what he said:

“Those of us who are well-fed, well-garmented and well-ordered ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our law-abiding, not to say virtuous, cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we have had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.”