“Still no evidence of any interest in the war”, George Orwell complains,
in a diary entry from May 1940, days before the Dunkirk evacuation began..
“Last night, Eileen and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’clock news. The
barmaid was not going to have turned it on if we had not asked her, and to
all appearances nobody listened.”

As the Ukraine war heads into its sixth month, that’s how it feels here.
When it was all air strikes, manoeuvres and newly-discovered execution
cells, the media were – rightly – in the thick of the action. Now,
although Russia’s tortures, rapes and executions continue, Europe’s first
major conventional war since 1945 has become, in British public
consciousness, like a chronic condition – to be checked on occasionally
and “managed”.

Russia is methodically “rubblising” cities in the Donbas; Ukraine, in
response is using the long-range rockets donated by the US to torch ammo
dumps and command posts deep behind Russian lines. The momentum on both
sides appears to be dwindling.

But at the strategic level the conflict has only begun. This week Russia
shut down Nord Stream 1, its vital gas pipeline to Germany, for what it
says is a routine maintenance operation. The German government fears the
supply will never restart. Even if it does, the high price and
deliberately choked supply of Russian gas to Europe would leave the
continent’s most gas-dependent economies in deep trouble.

In the run-up to the war, many European countries saw their domestically
held gas reserves depleted – by a mixture of reluctance to buy at inflated
prices and the refusal of states to act strategically on energy security..

Today, Russia-dependent utility companies in Germany are under severe
financial stress. Uniper, the biggest buyer of Russian gas, has applied
for a government bailout of up to €9bn in return for an equity stake. It
is being forced to buy Russian gas on the open market but prevented by a
price cap from passing the inflation on to consumers.

And it’s not just the energy companies. Much of German heavy industry is
dependent on gas for production and while major players such as BASF have
diversified supplies and reserves, industry leaders say it is smaller
companies, sometimes critical nodes in the supply network, who will feel
the stress first.

The German Green politician, Robert Habeck, who is the country’s
vice-chancellor, warned in June that a sudden gas shortage, combined with
the financial collapse of gas-dependent firms, could create a Lehman
Brothers-style moment where the whole energy market falls. On Tuesday he
told reporters: “The situation on the gas market is tense and
unfortunately we can’t guarantee that it will not get worse. We have to be
prepared for the situation to become critical.”

So both industry and the public sector are facing self-imposed gas
rationing. One big housing rental group in Germany has cut the temperature
of its residents’ central heating to 17 degrees. A town council in Saxony
has rationed hot running water for public housing tenants to three time
slots per day.

But all this is being treated in Britain like the rumblings of a distant
thunderstorm. Almost none of the Tory leadership candidates want to talk
about the strategic conflict Europe is embroiled in. Or the impact on
Britain if a Russian gas shutdown throws Germany – along with
gas-dependent Italy, Romania and Hungary – into a simultaneous political
and financial crisis.

British politics has successfully compartmentalised the cost-of-living
crisis as a domestic issue – seemingly unconnected to the war in Ukraine.
While it’s true there are multiple factors driving inflation – the
post-Brexit skills shortage, the post-Covid recovery, the deglobalisation
of supply chains – the price of Russian gas is the one factor that is
weaponised, and capable of weaponising all the others.

As household finance experts warn of energy bills topping the £3,000 mark
by 2023, it is time for politicians to level with the people, just as they
have done in Germany – and to contemplate radical action. If central
European countries are forced to switch the lights off, and introduce
compulsory rationing of heating and light this winter, and bail out
private companies with tens of billions of euros, that’s not just an
energy crisis, or a financial crisis. It will be a strategic blow in a
conflict between systems, initiated by Vladimir Putin.

People will go on the streets, rightly, to demand lower prices and
priority supply for households and public services, not non-essential
corporations and luxury consumption. Some, spurred by the conservative
right, will demand an end to decarbonisation targets, the energy taxes
that promote them and to bans on coal and fracking. And they will ask: who
is to blame?

Across Europe, there are political movements ready to blame Western
governments for supporting Ukraine, with arms and sanctions. In Germany
this includes the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a vocal section
of the Left Party and – tacitly – Putin-sympathetic voters among both the
social democratic and conservative electorates.

In Britain it will be the usual suspects: Nigel Farage, Reform UK and, on
the far left, the likes of George Galloway and Chris Williamson. But the
real British weak point – if an energy crisis does engulf Europe – will
be the Conservative electorate. They’ve been sold one lie – Brexit. A more
subtle lie was the story woven by Boris Johnson – that Britain could
shovel arms, ammunition and money into Ukraine without any domestic
consequences. Our support for the war was framed as a free hit against
totalitarianism, delivered by other people’s children and enhancing
Britain’s reputation as the unilateral tough guy of Europe.

With the emergence of the first fuel price protests, and renewed pledges
to abandon the net-zero target from Conservative leadership candidates,
we’re at the point where the UK, like the rest of Europe, has to face the
connectedness of the crises we are living through.

Russia fights strategically. Its strategic aim is to split Nato, shatter
the EU, blow apart Western democracies and install a Putin-friendly
politician in the White House. Its invasion of Ukraine, its dark
manoeuvrings with Lithuania over rail access, its shutdown of Nord Stream
1, and its blockade of grain exports to the Global South: each of these
events are “operations”. So is the disinformation war it is fighting: the
perpetual threats of nuclear armageddon mouthed by Putin’s acolytes on
live TV, the intimidation aimed at Western journalists.

It’s all part of something we must honestly call a war. The non-violent
stuff is there to back the missile strikes. It’s all there in the Russian
textbooks, which explain how economic pressure, political manipulation and
culture wars can render the “state victim” helpless, forcing Western
adversaries to act against their own interest.

The art of facing down Russia in Ukraine, retaining and enhancing our own
democratic freedoms, maintaining the resilience and openness of our
societies, and keeping the lights on – that’s the real challenge facing
this fractured Tory government. But its lost in the chatter. As with the
Brits Orwell observed in 1940, we are trapped in the delusions of a phoney
war. Unfortunately the next move lies with Russia.

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/07/uk-russia-energy-war