At a point at which homes face the prospect of £4000 energy bills in Britain I am researching the history of advertising and marketing for gas. I have been spending the hot summer in air conditioned rooms at the London Metropolitan Archives and the wonderful National Gas Archive in Warrington. In the 1970s, spurred on by war and oil embargoes, there was a cost of living crisis that shifted the way in which natural gas was presented to the customers of British Gas. From all of the promise and plenty of the gas discoveries in the North Sea in the 1960s during the 1970s the tone shifts towards one of restraint and national responsibility.
In 1967, the year that North Sea Gas began to be distributed to British homes, the Daily Mail ideal homes exhibition celebrated this new fuel at the Gas Council’s Gas pavilion:
“Already clean, automatic, and labour-saving, efficient and economical – soon gas will go natural, piped to you from gas fields thousands of feet below the North Sea. Once the cost of exploiting these finds is met, gas for you will be a lot cheaper […] A brand new indigenous asset which will benefit the whole community. Making Britain a more comfortable country to live in”
In this excerpt from the exhibition catalogue the discovery of North Sea Gas appears as a boon for the post-war economy. This national asset, run by a nationalised industry, would add to the wealth of the nation and provide improved living standards for everyone in it. In the context of a 1967 budget which announced a record national deficit and growing de-industrialisation, natural gas arrived as a possible fix for a country in fear of economic crisis. (The following year this same set of concerns led to the frankly unhinged ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign that saw a brief flurry in workers offering to work additional hours for no additional pay in the national interest).
North Sea Gas would make central heating more accessible to the working classes, the Gas Council promised that it would transform homes not only in terms of comfort but in terms of space. In the 1972 Ideal homes catalogue the Gas pavilion headline is ‘Find Space for Living Here’. Gas central heating was sold as a way to expand the space of the home, it would make the home a space of leisure as well as shelter. The catalogue claims: “One of the top priorities in many British homes; no longer a luxury enjoyed only by the affluent few, central heating is now regarded as a necessity for comfortable life”. Gas was to be plentiful and cheap, a central heating system was to cost £275, and many were able to fund this partly through local government improvement grants. There must have been some hope that improving living conditions would placate workers facing job losses and low wages, whilst also producing more demand for goods in the marketplace.
By 1974 the tenor of the copy in the Ideal Homes catalogues had changed: “Welcome to a world filled with warmth, cleanliness, work-saving ideas and money-saving economy” as the fuel and inflation crisis continue to bite British Gas is now trying to communicate the economic advantages of their fuel. In 1975 – under the headline ‘An invitation to see for yourself that gas is heat that obeys you’ the copy promises to show you. ‘How easily, simply and economically gas can be controlled, to help you save money and the nation fuel’. In 1976 the emphasis is yet stronger ‘Gas is not only clean economical, controllable fuel it is also British. By using natural gas from the North Sea we are saving £1000 million a year on Britain’s balance of payments’. The public were being told that their use of gas would at once help save them money and protect the nation’s economy.
This was in the context of the inflationary crisis of the 1970s, already well underway by the beginning of the Conservative Heath government. Inflation was then thrown into overdrive by the 1973 oil crisis where the OPEC countries embargoed oil exports to nations that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war. This price shock is commonly cited as a trigger for the stagflation of the 1970s when the economy stalled at the same time that costs soared, a situation which undermined the assumptions of the post-war Keynesian consensus. Namely that unemployment and inflation were held in a kind of balance between labour and consumer prices whereby when labour prices rose and costs subsequently increased the economy would shrink, unemployment would rise, and the pressure on labour prices would be reduced. The other key assumption of the Keynesian consensus was that nations could in effect operate as distinct economic identities, finding a natural balance between their exports and imports. But by the end of the 1970s any remaining belief in the post-war Keynesian economic consensus came to an end; that it had somehow solved capitalism, that a balance between labour and capital had been established and that there would be wealth for all forever.
The newly incorporated British Gas shifted its marketing from promising unceasing warmth for all into something which was somewhat more measured in its outlook. In 1974 British Gas launched a press advertising campaign with the slogan ‘Thank Heavens for Natural Gas’. In contrast to the message of the 1960s the controllability and speed of gas was now a tool of thrift and not plenty. In one particularly provocative advert published in this campaign. The advert says: ‘it belongs to Britain, so world events can’t suddenly put up the price of cut off the supply.’ Fuel is now firmly established as a geopolitical tool, what was once a matter of national pride, gas was now a weapon in global diplomacy and war. This allowed thrift to be re-branded as a kind of national duty, using less gas would preserve the power of the nation as well as cutting household bills.
This sense of duty is evident in another advert from 1975 with the strap line ‘Natural Gas too good to waste’. The headline reads ‘Britain Must Save Energy’. It claims that Britain is wasting energy which is impacting the value of sterling due to the amount of oil imports required to make up the deficit. ‘So remember if all gas users work together it can mean important savings making more gas available for other purposes. AND SAVING YOU MONEY’. These adverts may have been targeted towards industry, they were placed in magazines like Investor’s Chronicle, New Scientist, and The Spectator. Other adverts tried to communicate a similar message to the general public. They used the line ‘Controllable gas. Saving you money, and the nation fuel’. Big images of dials, thermostats, and switches with hands turning them down or turning them off. The message is – the nation’s economic future is in your hands!
It is this idea that the gas belongs to the nation that is so interesting. When the Thatcher government came to power in 1979 they quickly removed the price controls that had been brought in in 1972 by the Heath government to try to counter inflation. The report that they commissioned from Deloitte in 1983 on efficiency in the gas industry makes it clear that they felt that British Gas was failing to price their gas at an adequate rate. In that report they state ‘If the pricing policy is inappropriate, consumers will receive incorrect signals and the nation’s resources will be used wastefully’. Deloitte are demonstrating their absolute faith in the free market to manage demand. This report is demanding that any remnant of Keynesian thinking is eliminated from British Gas, prices should be allowed to rise and rise so that consumers know to reduce their consumption. Quality of life be damned – put a jumper on if you can’t afford it. The same discourse that our current government is committed to.
The adverts above are an artefact of what the energy industry was like before the British public were dispossessed of the infrastructure they had paid for both through taxes and then through bills. British Gas spoke to the public as if the economics of their household and of the nation were in tandem, that they shared a stake in this resource so they should have an interest in managing it. Not to idealise these – really quite nationalistic – adverts, but to identify the sharp difference between a way of thinking about energy as a matter of consumer choice, and of thinking about it as collective responsibility. Here is the crux, in the midst of a huge cost of living crisis, and record profits in the energy industry, energy companies have no innate interest in protecting society. They know that people this winter will face the choice of paying for energy they cannot afford or freezing in their homes, and for some this will not be a choice they get to make at all. There is no collective responsibility shared between energy company and customer, they exist to serve their shareholders alone. We are left relying on our government to intervene and provide relief to people who will genuinely have to choose to buy food or fuel.