Procedimientos

This chapter will bring together the perspectives offered in the previous two chapters by bringing the question of the future to the forefront. The case studies presented in chapters four and five are fixed according to time, 1974 and 2015, yet they demonstrate a number of similarities. As such, the chapter primarily addresses the ways in which they can be combined to think about the future. In both cases, memory was central to the exploration of both past and present, demonstrating how experiences are shaped by previous events. These experiences become myth embedded in the everyday practices of those trying to prevent disruption from occurring in the future. This chapter will revisit the ‘myth’ of the blackout spirit that was present, then move to an emphasis and exploration of maintenance, how the everyday work required in moments of transition demonstrated the human aspect of the design of the system but additionally something that prevented real change in the present from occurring, infrastructuring the future. The emergency plans created by several community groups in Lancaster after Storm Desmond will be looked at as an example of a tool of maintenance that allows change to occur in a future scenario. Breakdown is an intermediate stage that rarely lasts (Laet and Mol, 2000: 240). In this chapter I will highlight why maintenance is important in looking ahead, as it pre-empts failure and the stage of breakdown, arguing that maintenance is just as, if not more important than innovation within

‘future-making’.

In Chapter Four disruption was viewed in relation to the lived experience of the Second World War. Individuals used both artefacts and actions that were already present 35 years ago to cope with a breakdown of infrastructure. Chapter Five demonstrated how the events of the 1970s provided a potential strategy for coping in 2015. Through looking at additional material from those interviews it is apparent that those who had experienced the power cuts of 1973 adopted what they believed to be the same mechanisms for being resilient in 2015, with

160 similar actions and practices. It was not only those who had been alive in the 1970s that used the three-day week as a perceived source of knowledge and understanding. Henry, a student, stated that he is less prepared for events like Desmond than his parents are, as they ‘had to deal with blackouts all the time in the 1970s and they were much worse’. This belief, that there was a time ‘much worse’ than what was being experienced during the moment of disruption demonstrates the less dramatic than expected nature of the event once it has been experienced. It was no longer an isolated event but now something viewed in connection with other experiences.

Such reflection on disruptive events, along with a particular set of emotions to define the mood of an event where a community is stoic and determined in a difficult situation has been referred to as the ‘Blitz Spirit’ (Gilroy, 2004). Gilroy views this as the ‘rejection or deferral of the nation’s current problems’ and ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’ (2004: 96-7). ’Blitz Spirit’ demonstrates the importance of past events on identity and the ability to cope during crisis. A campaign originally designed to sustain civilian morale, the concept has since been unpacked as a myth (Calder, 1991; Curran and Seaton, 1997) finding the believed ideas of class unity during the events of the Second World War to be false. The case studies in this thesis demonstrate how the wish to be resilient, to carry on through the event, was present in the form of a ’blackout spirit’. The impact of this spirit created a moment that was perceived to demonstrate the formation of new publics - those who came together in an attempt to return to stability. The

‘blackout spirit’ in both cases was not only to assert normalcy. Additionally, through these emotions, it has since held these moments up as ones to reflect on and hold to account when considering the complexity of the event.

Historians have previously attributed the creation of ‘austerity politics’ to the beginning of the Thatcher administration in 1979, with policy structures serving to ‘legitimate regimes which constantly argued that despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce’

(Hatherley, 2016). As demonstrated in Chapter Four this notion was already embedded within the public psyche prior to 1979. The nation faced disruption to everyday life in 1974, such as the ration coupons that were provided to drivers and letters written to newspapers about the

161 minutiae of the crisis (4.2). The Three-Day Week was the beginning of the concept being used as a tool to justify austerity and an altered working of the governance system. In a party-political broadcast Prime Minister Edward Heath stated the moment would be a ‘harder Christmas than we have known since the war’.¹²³ Equating the crisis to the effect of the Second World War on the Home Front was not just a construct of the political sphere, used to shape political beliefs, but was a feature of everyday life during the energy crisis.

The shift in government intervention and management structures from Post-War nationalisation to privatisation in the 1990s, resulted in the 1970s becoming the political rhetoric used for ‘hard times’, fraught with false ideas and nostalgia (Pemberton, 2015: 7).

For example, in his first speech as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 2015, Tom Watson illustrated the misunderstanding of the events of the decade, ‘I remember the lights going out because Mr Heath was not paying the miners enough money’, the need to be resilient to the believed mechanisms of past are still important in shaping power, politically and physically.¹²⁴ During the 2017 General Election in the United Kingdom, the phrase ‘going back to the ‘70s’, was utilized by right-wing newspapers as signalling incoming and widespread disruption and disaster if Labour were to gain political power and Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister.¹²⁵ Considering the disruptive events explored in this thesis, a Royal Academy of Engineers report on the 2015 blackout in Lancaster stated that the historical infrastructure was the cause for the extent of the disruption in the city (Kemp, 2016).

Contemporary newspaper reports warning of power cuts in the future refer to ‘talk about winters of discontent and blackouts’, suggesting that the past is the framework by which to consider futures where power cuts are common place, as they have happened previously.¹²⁶

123 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj9OlIiHFo4

162 As Moraglio has noted, there is inertia at the core of infrastructure systems as often they are conceived, tested and created decades before (2015: 11), with publics conforming to this design for years after. There were changed infrastructure systems and the electricity grid between 1974 and 2015. The publicly owned network of 1974 is now privatised and divided and the grid that existed in 1974 has been constantly extended, repaired and altered to create the current system. The responses to the disruptions of normality also raised debates on the roles of various actors, differing in each case study due to the ways in which governance of the system were standardised.

The use of memory was presented as a feature of resilience during a time of disruption. This mood was encapsulated by an article in The Guardian, published during Storm Desmond;

‘Some of us remember the agreeable pace and candlelit pubs of the three-day week, when society adapted to predictable energy rationing. You put another jumper on. If you needed “to communicate” with someone, you rang from a phone box or walked to their house’.¹²⁷

Here the memory of 1974 is embedded within the recollections of the journalist, who creates a divide; between those who are older and therefore perceived to be more experienced in comparison with those who were not there, in contrast with those who were not there and cannot used ‘Three Day Week’ of 1974 as a memory to look back on. The language used evokes the myth of a ‘blackout spirit’ in a way that divides generations. By placing the reader back in 1974, during the three-day week, into a perceived situation that this thesis has shown is a simplistic, innovation-centric view of the disruption is a mechanism which allows for further decay of the system. The causes and nature of the 2015 Lancaster blackout were

1. ¹²⁷ ‘’Hammering, grim, brainless’ – how Storm Desmond hit Lancaster’, The

Guardian, 9 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-

news/2015/dec/09/storm-desmond-lancaster-floods-chaos-power-neighbourliness-ian-martin.

163 different to 1974. Looking back in this way ignores the problems of the present, there is focus on what has happened rather than what could and will happen. Instead, the future is taken as a moment where processes need to be removed from what has gone before, and be completely new. This is where innovation fails as a method for coping with change and disruption to infrastructures in the future, as it does not incorporate multiple timescales and structures of power.

By positioning the narrative of the past event as central to the situation being experienced in the present, the problems of the moment are hidden by a need to believe the disruption is less severe as they are compared to a situation that had different causes and consequences.

For example, the effects and rate of climate today are different to those in 1974. The journalist of the Guardian piece continues by commenting that communication technologies of today are the problem; ‘what’s different now is our shocked disbelief at the disappearance of the internet’. This version of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ myth – that communities have a historic ability to endure suffering by ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ is damaging to use when looking ahead to the future as it prevents a recognition of previous failures, current problems and subsequent events. It overlooks the technologies and practices in place in the present, this suggests that those who experienced the 1970s are the individuals who can be resilient during further disruption and that both the nature and management of disruption was the same in 2015 as it was in 1974. This was not the case. As 2015 demonstrated, not everyone who lost power had experienced previous blackouts, yet the community was still able to cope through the disruption. This false belief highlights how not only the present is inherently connected to the past, but additionally futures and change are dependent on what has gone before.

Memories and path dependency matter because they set into place actions and attitudes that remain for more than one generation, memories are shared between generations – as are policy decisions.

In both case studies, publics were formed to tackle a specific issue that needed to be tackled, the threat or reality of power cuts. The public sought to be resilient to the threat of further disruption and cope with what was happening by coming together. However, their actions were not about creating innovative ways of coping with the threat and change. Instead,

164 actions and affect during the blackout were about maintaining current systems of power rather than radical overhaul and change. Closely related to the ideas embedded within increased morale during crisis, considering maintenance as the tool for dealing with this complexity, rather than this nostalgic and fabricated community spirit, this chapter focuses on the practical immediate futures, change and actions after the event, demonstrating the continuities and differences between disruption, normality and other moments of disruption.

How people in the present respond to the past and act on the future is meshed together in a way that needs to be understood by those living with the systems that are affected by disruption. The proximity of cultural experience of hardship and pulling together in the war made a difference in 1974 at a national level, as it was a time when publics had been formed to cope with disruption to everyday practices, with national importance. In the case of the 2015 blackout, this was not lost but rather adapted to the local level – those who had lived through 1974 became the ones who referred back to previous cultural experience. It should also be noted that although no participants in 2015 referred to the Second World War, this is because none of the interviewees had lived through this event. A generational difference in memory occurs with the passing of time, people who have experienced past events die and those connections are lost.

This blackout spirit illustrates the perceived emotions of community that prevent possible new futures from emerging – by viewing the situation as a temporary event that will be solved by mechanisms of the past. A temporary stabilization of a temporary event. Mediation through a ‘blackout spirit’ acted as a ‘process of relation that involved translation and change’

(Anderson, 2014: 13). Power systems, both the network and Government during 2015 were different in their structures and standards to those in 1974. Similarly, the electrical grid and methods of management were different in 1974 to those in the 1940s and the Second World War.