DON’T PAY was a low-budget campaign aimed at tackling the energy bill crisis.

Starting with a plan scrawled on a beer mat and taking inspiration from both the poll tax struggle and water bill refusal, it was launched at the TUC rally on June 18 2022. 

Within five months Don’t Pay had got 250,000 people to pledge to an energy bills strike, 32,000 signed up as “organisers,” received viral media coverage and built a national network of postcode-based WhatsApp groups.

We achieved a government U-turn on the energy price cap, caused energy companies to brief the government on an “existential threat” to their business model and led the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng premiership to borrow £150 billion on the bond markets, a move that sealed their fate and brought down the administration.

However, despite the partial victory, this promising moment has evaporated, leaving little more than stickers on lamp posts. As someone who got involved in the early stages of the movement, I think there are important lessons to be learned for future efforts to push back.

Don’t Pay came about due to an unprecedented rise in household energy bills and the forecast of an even steeper increase on October 1 2022. 

Britain’s energy supply had existed as a rigged market for years, with a handful of actual producers and up to 30 middlemen providers. A rise in international energy prices in 2021 caused that market to collapse with large providers such as Bulb (with 1.7 million customers) going bust that November. 

Bulb was brought under direct government control, a special administration regime, the bailout being added to everyone’s bills, but with the chairman still on a £250,000 salary.

Already tens of thousands were unable to pay, with many households in fuel poverty, forced to choose between heating and eating. Meanwhile, energy producers were posting record profits, the likes of Shell and BP making £8 billion a quarter.

Martin Lewis, the consumer affairs correspondent, who occupies a Lineker-like quasi-political position in the British public imagination, began to sound the alarm about energy bills tripling or even quadrupling by October.

As an idea, Don’t Pay really resonated. We weren’t so much building this movement, as channelling it: the conversations around non-payment were already happening in the workplace, the pub and at the school gates. 

We started with three simple demands: a return to pre-April 2022 prices; an end to the imposition of prepayment meters; no-one to go cold this winter. 

We aimed to sign up one million people to strike by October 1. Our first national Zoom call, to which thousands signed up, was a clear indicator that we’d broken out of the organised left — not least because of the number of attendees who had clearly never used Zoom before.

The left needs to recognise moments like this and make sure our lightning rod is up first. This is not an argument against the long-term building of movements and structures, but we have to learn to operate at more than one tempo.

We knew that fuel protesters, right-wing populists and other groups well outside the left and labour movement were already thinking about something similar — in fact, one of the campaign’s early adherents was anti-migrant rabble-rouser Katie Hopkins 

We also secured the support of controversial, quasi-left, hippy guru Russell Brand, meaning we gained an audience among the “lockdown sceptical.”

Tricky terrain to be sure, but by seizing the initiative early, we parked our tanks on the populist right’s lawn and made sure that the conversation was centred around fossil fuels, profits and the need for a social tariff, rather than right-wing attacks on net zero, migrants and a return to fracking. 

Of course, the other major fightback against the cost-of-living crisis was happening with the wave of public-sector strikes. However, the majority of below-median-income households are not unionised — so little was available to them but to cheer on the strikers. 

Crucially, Don’t Pay’s strategy, a bill strike, had a low bar of entry and the chance for high impact. Simply cancelling a direct debit only leads to the energy companies writing to you after 28 days, but a mass foot-dragging that would have a huge impact on profits at low risk to the striker was possible. 

Rather than lobbying for nationalisation by a future Labour government, people could take action in their living rooms.

It also provided a bridge between those who literally couldn’t pay and those who could afford to take action.

By empowering people, we were able to crystallise individual household money worries into a political movement. We were also able to dispel myths around the process of disconnection and expose the weakness of enforcement mechanisms. 

This worried the energy companies so much that they began lobbying the government for a response, describing the campaign as an “existential threat” to the sector — of course, they really meant it was an existential threat to their ability to keep profiting from price-gouging.

Don’t Pay achieved a phenomenal media profile. It’s probably fair to say that we turned down media opportunities that most grassroots campaigns would have begged for. 

However, we didn’t rely on professional spokespeople or well-known left-wing pundits. We recruited normal people from the WhatsApp network and offered them media training. 

People who had been nervous about talking on the phone to the local radio station soon found themselves on national TV. For the media, as with campaigns like Just Stop Oil, the hook was that we were bending if not perhaps breaking the law. This generated outrage, phone-ins and column inches.

We were able to advance the idea of a “social tariff,” a common-sense measure that would see energy prices banded, with households able to purchase their basic needs at rock-bottom prices but power becoming more expensive as they moved up the scale. 

This would be a reversal of the current cruel and wasteful system that, due to the standing charge, sees energy become cheaper the more is used. It should cost less per unit to heat a tin of beans than it does an outdoor pool.

The counteroffensive came rapidly once Truss entered office. The government borrowed £150bn on the bond markets to reverse the projected October price increase. They also offered a £400 rebate on bills, cunningly linked to direct debits. 

This effectively split the fragile coalition we had built, as the upper working and lower middle classes who’d been tempted to join the strike, calculated that they would make it through the winter after all; although the number of people pledging to strike had been rapidly increasing it was clear that we would now not reach the proposed one million.

In a bizarre coincidence, the same day that Truss announced her plan and Don’t Pay was ready to respond (with multiple media interviews lined up), the Queen died. As remarked at the time, we might as well have fired our press release at the moon.

This bailout came out at huge expense to the public purse and was a massive act of corporate welfare aimed at propping up profits. It spooked the markets and was a major factor in the collapse of the Truss premiership. 

Although the extravagance of this gesture is unlikely to be repeated, no government is going to allow energy bills to be raised to the point of popular revolt again.

However, the cost-of-living crisis hasn’t gone anywhere. Despite wholesale energy prices actually falling, and with renewables consistently being the cheapest source of energy, the price cap is still twice what it was in April 2022. 

Over six million households are in fuel poverty and there are signs that the forced installation of prepayment meters is about to come back. The rocketing price of food alone points to the possibility of a citizens’ revolt. Can we bottle lightning twice?