On 21 September, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the BBC’s political editor that he did not ‘believe people will be short of food’ this winter. Mr. Johnson was not referring to fears of food shortages in North Korea or Afghanistan or Yemen. He was addressing concerns conceded earlier that day by his administration’s Business Secretary that ‘it could be a very difficult winter’ for the UK.

So how could one of the world’s wealthiest nations suddenly be warning of the worst season it would have seen since 1978’s legendary ‘winter of discontent’ – the period of reduced public services and industrial disputes, laden with threats of food shortages and power cuts, the final days of an embattled socialist administration whose failures swept Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party into government for the following 18 years?

Various interrelated factors had coincided to transform what the Prime Minister wanted to portray as a political storm-in-a-teacup into a potentially perfect economic storm. The country had been hit by a combination of the infrastructural and logistical impacts of Brexit, the Covid-19 crisis, a long-term dearth of lorry drivers, disruptions to shipping, planned cuts in state welfare payments and a sudden hike in natural gas prices, which in turn led to the collapse of a number of energy companies and massive reductions in the production of carbon dioxide, a commodity harmful for the atmosphere but essential to agriculture and food production. 

It is of course true that other European countries have also been impacted badly by the gas crisis. Spanish energy prices have, for example, increased by a third in the last year, while Italy has spent billions to curb rises in domestic fuel costs. But, thanks to Brexit and other self-made problems, this situation has hit Britain particularly hard.

Four days before Mr. Johnson’s attempt to reassure the nation, one of the UK’s best-loved retailers had announced that it would be chartering a fleet of additional container ships in a bid to avoid severe disruption to the nation’s yuletide festivities: ‘We’re acting hard and we’re acting fast to make sure we can still deliver a fantastic sparkly Christmas to our customers.’ Also that week, the UK press had begun to fill with panic-stricken reports that the scarcity of carbon dioxide (used both in the preservation of foods and in the slaughter of livestock) could result in the British people being denied their traditional festive treat of a turkey dinner – and indeed many other meals in the months ahead. (We may note that the government’s immediate response to this impending catastrophe was to pay millions to an American company which makes carbon dioxide to get it to agree to carry on making it. They later extended visas to European truck drivers, suspended competition rules, demanded that haulage firms pay higher wages, and drew up plans to call the army in.)

Carbon dioxide is also used in the production of beer. Lenin famously proposed that no society is more than three missed meals away from revolutionary chaos. British society is very clearly only ever a few pints of lager and a roast dinner away from anarchy. However, this isn’t anywhere near as trivial as it might sound. The fortunes of emperors have fallen on less.

Christmas matters hugely to the British psyche. It is culturally significant and socially binding, regardless of one’s religious affiliations. The mid-winter feast has deeper roots than its current Christian incarnation. It is the most important festival of the year, which the Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin might have seen as a balm for the body politic. It’s ancient Rome’s bread and circuses condensed into a few days. That was why last year Prime Minister Boris Johnson felt forced to risk the nation’s health on the promise that Christmas wouldn’t be cancelled – a pledge which resulted in the sharpest spike in Covid-19 infections the country had suffered. This current threat to Christmas may have long-term political repercussions, just as it did for Jim Callaghan’s Labour government forty-three years ago.

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Anxieties had been exacerbated a week prior to Mr. Johnson’s denials of a looming Christmas crisis when England’s Chief Medical Officer had ominously announced, while standing alongside the Prime Minister at a press conference, that ‘winter is coming’. This was such an obvious allusion to the tagline for the fantasy television series Game of Thrones that it triggered a wave of sensationalist newspaper headlines and very possibly also set the country’s more fanciful imaginations flowing with thoughts of the armies of the dead returning to wreak their terrible vengeance upon the lands of the living… which sounded almost as bad as having to suffer a second low-key Christmas in a row.

But, on 21 September, as trouble brewed back home, the British Prime Minister was in the United States to visit the American President and the headquarters of the UN, when he was challenged on the energy crisis by the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg. At the opening of that evening’s main news bulletin, the reporter had, as we’ve observed, quizzed Mr. Johnson as to his responses to predictions of a winter emergency, and had then noted the incongruity of his denials of those threats of food and fuel shortages while standing in such an opulent location – near the top of a skyscraper in New York. The Prime Minister bullishly retorted that the journalist was also standing near the top of a skyscraper in New York, apparently oblivious to the fact that she was only there because he was. This only served to underline a sense that he was no longer entirely in touch (if indeed he ever had been) with the reality of the precarious life experiences of so many of his country’s people.

This was not the only point at which the detachment of Britain’s ruling classes became evident during that particular half-hour on BBC One, early in the evening of Tuesday 21 September. That same news bulletin ended with a story about the British royal family. The news anchor seemed visibly uncomfortable with this simpering account of aristocratic entitlement which appeared to presume that tales of such casual privilege would prove heartening at a time of perceived national crisis. The report in question revealed that the Queen of England’s husband, who had died in April at the age of 99, had regularly enjoyed getting his grandchildren to squirt mustard onto the ceilings of their palatial homes. While the report noted that ‘Her Majesty was not amused’ by this repeated tomfoolery, it failed to mention what the noble family’s servants thought of the onerous and undignified task of having to scrub mustard from those ceilings, as an inevitable consequence of this wasteful performance of an unthinking royal prerogative.

However, as the British government doubles down on its plans to reduce benefits payments for some of the country’s poorest people, as fuel prices rise and fears of food shortages return, and as medical experts warn of winter months during which the nation’s health service may be overwhelmed by spikes in Covid-19 and seasonal influenza infections, one might suppose it may be reassuring to some that the United Kingdom’s upper classes and its political elite remain as divorced as they have always been from the everyday concerns of ordinary human beings. Yet let’s also afford some respect for those two BBC journalists whose tones of reporting on the evening of 21 September suggested that they did not themselves suppose that this situation was amusing at all and that the general public’s awareness of the high lives led by the UK’s most privileged few might bring only the coldest of comforts in these darkest of days.

On 23 September, the front page of the popular newspaper the Daily Mail was emblazoned with the headline ‘Britain faces winter of woe’. In the days that followed, the news continued to be dominated by similar stories: petrol stations closing due to lorry driver shortages, fears of panic-buying in the shops and on the forecourts, and the government saying it had to ‘prepare for the worst’ in relation to fuel price rises. By the start of last week, press reports about possible fuel and food shortages (originally just a handful of petrol stations temporarily closed) had provoked so much hoarding by consumers that the country started to experience real food and fuel shortages. Long lines of cars snaked towards petrol stations across the land; and because people who didn’t need to do so were filling their tanks, many of those who urgently needed petrol to get to work – such as healthcare workers, teachers and retail workers – didn’t have the fuel to do so. Like last year’s stockpiling of toilet paper (which had spread from Hong Kong, through Australia to the United States and Europe), this irrational hysteria had become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But, even in this chaos, we must concede that Britain is not naturally a nation of revolutionaries – so please don’t hold your breath awaiting the next insurrection on this small island. We may panic and we may grumble; some of us may protest on the streets, or honk our horns as we queue for fuel, or even wrestle in the supermarket aisles for the last twelve-pack of toilet rolls; but it’s been nearly four centuries since the English last had recourse to mass armed civil struggle, and that didn’t end too well. Though we may reasonably imagine that these disruptions, if they continue for the next few months, may yet have dire political consequences for the current administration, it seems fair enough to admit that it would take a full-scale paramilitary assault upon Santa Claus himself – and the holding hostage of all his little elves – to convince the great British public to hazard a wholesale return to the barricades.