The second time, the whole place went dark. The only illumination was the eerie glow of emergency lighting. Once again, the curtains closed, and the stage manager begged for our patience. After a couple of minutes, the house lights returned, but the hiatus dragged on until the final, apologetic, announcement that, after a total of three power cuts, the show couldn’t go on. Like the cast and crew, front-of-house staff coped perfectly, and as promised our tickets were refunded within hours.

Resorting to a local pub, our party discovered that the theatre over the road had cancelled their show before curtain up — again, because of power cuts. I later discovered that half a dozen West End shows had experienced power cuts that night. One of our group had recently been at Glyndebourne, which also had to cancel a performance because of power outages, prompting some snide commentary about that opera house’s lone wind turbine. 

Ironically, the report into March’s power outage that closed Heathrow Airport for a day had been published that very morning. So I became curious: was Glyndebourne’s often-mocked wind turbine unfairly blamed for the power cut that hit the opening night of Saul? Was our power outage a fluke, driven perhaps by the heatwave making unreasonable demands on the grid? Are theatres, with their energy-hungry lighting and special effects, particularly susceptible? 

Or is this a wider problem? Is the UK’s electricity supply becoming less reliable? That is a question which, it turns out, is hard to answer. Anecdotally, stories of power cuts lasting from a minute to a week seem to be more and more frequent. Small outages don’t even make the news: hardly anyone reported the show cancellations we experienced. But power suppliers give only generic answers, and theatre managers don’t want to comment at all.

We can piece things together, though. First, Glyndebourne. The opera house was not relying on its solitary wind turbine when it fell prey to power outages. Instead, said UK Power Networks, which maintains electricity networks across much of England, the outages were the result of a local fault. The half-dozen West End shows affected by power cuts the same night as ours were all in the same electricity distribution area, and that outage was down to a cable fault — rather than being weather-related. So the heatwave is off the hook.

But do theatres still — as they did back when I wielded a spanner and could tell you the catalogue numbers of my favourite colored gels — draw so much power from the grid that a poorly designed lighting rig can unbalance the substation?

The answer to that one is more complicated. 

Lighting technology has transformed in recent decades. LEDs have replaced most of the incandescent bulbs that would put out enough heat to burn a careless technician’s fingers. Rob Halliday, a stage lighting designer, calculated that the change could reduce the total energy demand for one performance by more than a quarter. The lighting for one musical could be done for less than 90 kilowatt-hours per performance — about the same wattage that Transport for London uses to transport 600 people for one kilometer. So it takes more electricity to get us all home than to entertain us.

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Perhaps more importantly for electricity suppliers, the energy demand has evened out, as peak power requirements have fallen to less than half the pre-LED levels. Curtain calls, when all the lights are blazing, are the moment of highest electricity use — but even if all West End shows had their curtain calls simultaneously, the local substations should be able to cope better than twenty years ago. 

On the other hand, Halliday pointed out to me, as theatre productions become more spectacular, with more special effects and dynamic staging, other energy-hungry equipment like winches and motors may be eating up the spare power. Then you have to add the ordinary building lighting, heating, bar and ice cream fridges, possibly air conditioning, and stage lighting starts to fade into insignificance. 

It nevertheless seems unlikely that theatres, compared to other public buildings, transport systems, and street lighting, are especially demanding of electricity suppliers. The latter are responsible for more than a quarter of local authority energy bills, which explains those authorities’ willingness to follow theatres in replacing older street lights with LEDs.

Which leaves me with my final question: was my party just unlucky, or is the UK experiencing more power outages? 

In the West End alone, Halliday tells me, “there have been a number of occasions I know about where there have been genuine power problems”. London is, after all, a tangle of tunnels, wires and pipes snaking around cellars and basements, with no definitive guide to what goes where. This is a tall order for anyone trying to maintain critical energy infrastructure, let alone repair it in a hurry. Many of the buildings are also old, with idiosyncratic wiring, though theatre wiring may be refurbished more regularly than, say, that of the Houses of Parliament. 

But on the other hand, it’s always easy to blame power when a problem is a technical one that’s specific to the building. Halliday tells me a story from decades ago: a failing show was closed shortly after opening for extensive rewrites and re-rehearsal, and “the excuse they gave to the public on that occasion was power problems”. A few days later, there were actual power problems in the building. “So we ended up with a generator parked outside, and the electricity board said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we’re not covering the cost of this, because we read in the press that there were power problems, and you didn’t tell us.’”

UK Power Networks reassured me that “the electricity network is 99.99% reliable” — but that would leave a one-in-10,000 chance of failure at any time. And with millions of customers, that means plenty of room for problems. Halliday, like me, has the impression that UK power infrastructure is struggling to keep up with changing patterns of supply and demand. 

Decades of under-investment and planning delays have left the UK power grid out of date and sometimes struggling to cope. Old electricity power plants are shutting down faster than they can be replaced by new ones, leaving us regularly reliant on imported energy. Supply from intermittent renewable sources, requires different distribution infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing steadily when demand also fluctuates. Failure to regulate the frequency and voltage of power supply caused the massive Iberian Peninsula power outage earlier this year, according to a Spanish government report.

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May 2025 saw another power outage that hit multiple London Underground lines, on this occasion a National Grid cable fault that caused a fire at a substation. And of course the March substation fire caused Heathrow Airport to close for a day, with enormous impact on airlines and travelers, though no casualties. That catastrophic failure was traced to a known fault that went unrepaired for nearly seven years, compounded by the age of the substation and Heathrow’s assumption that such an event was a low-probability.

Are electricity suppliers complacent about the reliability of their systems? They maintain otherwise. UK Power Networks recently upgraded the Leicester Square substation to increase current reliability and future capacity. They’ve also adopted a “new technology” to reduce power cuts — consisting of steel support trusses for the poles carrying overhead power lines. You may giggle, but the power failure that hit Glyndebourne could perhaps have been prevented by such reinforcement. In general, suppliers are trying to anticipate and prevent unplanned power outages.

Nor are theatres content to relegate power outages to “low-probability events”. They don’t want to lose a single performance, says Halliday, so insurers insist on building redundancy into technical systems: sending the audience home, and refunding tickets, is the last thing they want. For every West End show’s lighting desk, “there’ll be a backup one sitting under the table, live, tracking along, ready to go. And other departments do that as well.”

Some theatres have back-up power supplies. Glyndebourne switched to battery storage when power outage hit Saul’s opening night, but in the absence of wind to turn the turbine, it wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the show. One newly-built London theatre has a generator on the roof, in case of power failure: clearly already enough of a problem in 2022 to merit an entire back up power system.

For Halliday, the question is why more venues don’t couple battery storage with solar panels, as festivals are starting to do. “I’ve become a bit obsessed with solar power,” he says. “It baffles me every time I walk past the National Theatre, for example, which is a big giant expanse of space that’s beautifully lit by the sunshine all day long. Why is that not covered in solar panels?”

So perhaps the unfairly maligned Glyndebourne windmill is not such a terrible idea. If the electricity distribution system fails, venues with their own generation and storage capacity will be able to say, “the show must go on”. Whether the transport system will still get us home afterwards is another question.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

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Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

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But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

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For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.

Fortunately, we made an early call. Many who made a similar decision later on found themselves at the mercy of Uber, facing huge price hikes. Apparently, the Uber algorithm, more sensitive than the local cab company to the fluctuations of supply and demand, sent prices through the roof. A similar power cut in March 2018 meant that stranded commuters were faced with Uber price surges of up to 500%.

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Amongst the most disturbing lessons that my father attempted to teach me as a child was that something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, he maintained. Value is simply a function of supply and demand.

Well, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For the kindly Muslim taxi driver that took us home, the algorithm was pretty simple: the job was worth his time plus his costs plus a reasonable profit. Our misfortune was not something to be exploited by a profit-maximising algorithm. And I thank him for that.

Now it may have been entirely incidental that our cab driver was a person of faith. And I absolutely do not put his behaviour down to the fact that, as a believer, he was a better person than those greedy, pagan executives over at Uber. But what I did wonder, as we trundled down the M1, was whether we had been the beneficiaries of a world-view in which things do, in fact, have intrinsic value.

The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire.

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This is why, at a philosophical level at least, capitalism and religious belief are fundamentally enemies. The former is inherently relativistic and free-floating, the latter rooted in a view of the world where there are immutable and stable values.

I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging.

For instance, as Kolozi points out, conservatism in the post-Bellum American South looked suspiciously upon capitalism as a northern phenomenon that threatened the traditional structures of community life. This was a version of conservatism that sought to maintain a form of life built upon racial privilege. And most of us are glad it was destroyed.

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But the South’s experience of capital’s power to destroy traditional community structures – for good or ill – formed an important part of the traditional conservative tradition (often known as paleo-conservatism) and its attitude towards capitalism.

As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.” Damning the “mercenaries” of the capitalist class, Carlson called for:

“a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

This could almost have been Bernie Sanders.

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The conservative case against capitalism is built on three basic differences between the two ideologies.

First, the obvious point. Conservatives like to conserve. By contrast, capitalism is the most powerful change-agent the world has ever seen. Karl Marx had it right when he explained capitalism in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

To those who are capitalism’s most vigorous moral proponents, this is its virtue: creative destruction. When what is being destroyed is a society of racial superiority, as with the American South, that is a good thing. But when what is being destroyed is a whole infrastructure of mutual care and support – family, unions, church, stable communities – then we might think very differently.

The second difference is the one alluded to in my taxi story: capitalism’s anti-metaphysics – or, to use Marx’s expression, the profanation of the holy. It is not incidental that religion has played an important role within the conservative tradition. For religious belief locates value beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of human desire, beyond human subjectivity. God is the fixed point around which human value turns.

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But hang on, weren’t the religious right of the Regan era, for instance, capitalism’s biggest fans? Yes, but this was more to do with their pathological hatred of Soviet Communism and its programmatic atheism. During the Cold war, the Christian Right imagined that their enemies’ enemy – capitalism – to be their friend. The new style anti-capitalist conservative of the Carlson variety believes this alliance to have been short-sighted.

Third, anti-capitalist conservatives maintain that the moral life is a communal and necessarily rooted activity. They put particular value on loyalty to place and kin as necessary constituents of moral formation and of human flourishing.

In this regard, they have begun to whisper to each other that the global reach of multi-national capitalism is undermining the very basis of moral existence and human happiness. Capitalism severs people from their roots, treating human labour as just another commodity to be moved around the world at the service of supply and demand.

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These new-look conservatives have a totally different feel to the ones that progressives have been used to dealing with. Take someone like Kentucky farmer and contemporary poet Wendell Berry. Radically committed to the environment, a lyricist of human rootedness, implacably hostile to technology, broadly Christian, in many ways he feels more Left than Right, yet his moral vision fits more comfortably within the old tradition of Southern Agrarians than it does within that of the progressives.

Or take American writer Rod Dreher, more obviously on the Right, yet whose Benedict Option advises a withdrawal from the values of capitalism:

“what has been missing from capitalism for a long time is any sense of morality, care for neighbor and community, and love for the “other” that Christianity absolutely demands, but that this current iteration of capitalism says is foolish.”

The US TV Series American Gods is premised upon the idea of a war between the old Gods of religion and the new gods of technology and celebrity and finance. This is the war that a new generation of American Conservatives have now joined. J. D. Vance, for example, the Conservative author of Hillbilly Elegy, was baptised a Catholic last week. Agreeing with Carlson, he has asked: “What happens when the companies that drive the market economy — and all of its benefits — don’t care about the American nation’s social fabric?”

Even Vance, a venture capitalist, is wobbling in his faith in the redemptive potential of corporate finance. I suspect that is why he has chosen the old gods over the new.

Ironically, it is progressives – the Clintons, for example – who continue to look to the gods of finance to drive us all towards the sunny uplands of a bright new world. Historically, it is liberalism that was formed alongside capitalism, and liberalism – especially classical liberalism – that shares the same basic assumptions about the freedom of the individual. That is why, for instance, woke liberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism sit so neatly together. And why, to the bafflement of many on the traditional Left, the case against capitalism is now being made more forcibly from the Right.