Cost of living crisis: Time to take to the streets like the French to force Ministers to act – Rob Potts

There’s a lot about Frenchness to be applauded. The thing I love the most about the French though, is that once they’re irked or annoyed they make their voices heard and a casual Gallic shrug 
can quickly become a determined Gallic roar.

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This willingness to cry “non!” whenever the merde hits the fan was brought to mind when my estimated gas and electricity bill landed on the doormat last week.

As soon as I saw the letters “EDF” on the envelope, my heart froze momentarily. The irony of the fact that Électricité de France is a utilities company largely owned by the French state was not lost on me, but I was more concerned by the horrors that lay inside the envelope.

I poured myself a glass of red wine to calm my nerves, sat down and carefully opened it.

My fears were quickly confirmed: a 54 per cent price hike (compared with just four per cent in France) and another axe blow to our already decimated household budget.

Thoughts immediately turned to where savings could be made: fewer takeaways; fewer nights out; being more careful to turn out the lights whenever one of us leaves the room.

Perhaps the kids might have to forego some of the expensive clubs and activities that we ferry them to and from each weekend.

These are, of course, very much first world problems, but what about those for whom there is no more fat in the budget left to trim?

What of the millions of working poor shamefully forced to eke out a meagre existence? What still of those thousands on the fringes of our own communities living in abject poverty and forced to beg, borrow and steal in order to fund the next electricity token?

With fuel prices rocketing, the cost of household necessities creeping eerily upwards, and even those of us who’ve grown accustomed to cosy petit bourgeois lifestyles having to seek counsel from people like the food blogger Jack Monroe in order to stretch our budgets, things are looking decidedly bleak.

The dreaded “cost of living crisis” that we’ve been warned about for so long is very much on our doorsteps.

When faced with such desperate circumstances, you would expect the British public to take to the streets and make our voices heard but that’s really not our way.

We tut, we tweet, we issue a resigned shrug and we accept the status quo.

If such hardships were to be imposed upon our closest neighbours across the Channel, the reaction would be markedly different.

The people would be out in force, manning the barricades and angrily waving placards. Within hours, the streets of Paris would look like they were hosting a flash mob production of Les Misérables.

We British don’t go for those kind of histrionics though, do we?

Our trade union movement was all but emasculated in the 1980s, and even now the Government is still seeking to curb our legal right to protest through its Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

And yet we sit, we tweet, we tut, we shrug and we do nothing. Chuck D (or was it Alexander Hamilton?) once memorably wrote: “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.”

These words have never been more apt.

In the past couple of years we’ve seen our civil rights eroded and our standard of living drop.

We’ve watched (and no doubt tutted) as our politicians have flouted the very laws that they’ve introduced whilst feathering the nests of their friends and donors.

And still we’ve done nothing. As a nation, we’ve ended up with the government we deserve rather than the government that we need. It’s a desperate situation that we can no longer afford to tolerate.

It’s time for us to raise our voices collectively and say “enough”.

We need to clamber off our sofas, put down our phones and tablets and, if necessary, take to the streets in order to make our voices heard. In short, we need to put aside our British reserve and learn to be a little more French.

Rob Potts works at Parklands Primary School in Leeds and is the author of The Caring Teacher – How to make a positive difference in the classroom.

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