 Hello, hello, hello. I'm Maren Khalili and this is Frontline, a series of interviews where I talk with activists, organisers or just regular people who have confronted the establishment to figure out how they do it. And in today's interview, which was recorded on November 4th, 2022, I talk with Simon Howard. He's one of the organisers of the Don't Pay UK campaign for a massive payment strike on December 1st. And he explains a lot about the inner workings of the campaign in this interview. We talk about the tools they use, how they went from nothing to 250,000 signatures in just a couple of months with 32,000 organisers. Simon was very generous with his time. He was very, very open about the mechanics of the campaign. And I think there's a lot to learn from in this interview. So without further ado, I bring you Simon Howard. I'm a UK citizen and I work in the building trade. Okay. And you're very involved in the Don't Pay UK campaign to ask people to withhold their energy bills, basically a payment strike. Tell me a bit about that. What is the situation that has created the need for this strike? In the UK, we've been dealing with an ongoing cost of living crisis as wages stagnate and inflation has let rip. One of the more obvious aspects of this has been the massive increase in energy bills. The maximum amount that the energy companies are allowed to charge households is calculated according to the equation. In the run up to October, this campaign started in June. So it started on June 18, 2022. We'd already had massive price rises in energy in April. A lot of the energy suppliers had gone bust and been taken up by the government or amalgamated or people have been forced to switch companies. So people's energy bills were very, very high. And then another massive increase looked like it was going to happen in October, possibly tripling or dribbling people's energy bills. Some people, a group of friends in London, I believe, I didn't get involved two or three weeks later. I saw it on Facebook and got involved. People got together as a wireless, you know, we can organize a payment strike on this genuine leverage here in that everyone is individually responsible for their own bill. We could pull everyone together. We already knew that with the increase in prices, particularly predicted October increases that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people are already not going to be able to pay. And that we were going to try to crystallize this into a political moment, not allow people to be individually picked off, but turn into a political movement. And that's how don't pay started. The energy companies Shell, BP, they're all making a killing, right? I mean, I've got some stats in front of me that Shell has doubled their profits from 2021 and made 8.2 billion in the last three months, BP also double compared to the same period of last year in terms of profits. So the bills are using tripling and quadrupling. And the profits of the energy companies are expanding. What's going on there a little bit? I mean, you tell me, I think we all guess what's going on there. But I think that the situation we have here, and that might be might be very different to other parts of Europe. The situation we have here is that we have a one of these rigged, false markets in this country. So you've got the people who mine and extract the energy, the growth, the big energy giants. And then you have the people you actually get your electricity bill from, supply the energy. And this was all deregulated, very saturate, big bang economics. So you have all these companies that you can switch between and look for bargains or whatever in this kind of free market. There isn't one because when the crunch actually came and the unit price went up, these companies all ended up offering the same deal. And many of them went bust because they offered on very slim margins. So what we've always said is don't pay is that we need to get rid of this rigged market entirely and be dealing directly with the energy giants who are banking billion dollar profits quarter on quarter, almost to the point where senior figures within the industry have demanded to be taxed. Because the situation is so ludicrous, the imbalance is so ludicrous. And I think they can they can see that the social unrest that will follow from energy bills increasing to this extent. The don't pay campaign top line like what what are your demands? The top three demands is that it should have been the first, certainly pre October, no energy price hike in October. That's what we demanded. And no any factor return to the April 2021 prices. So so attacking the price rise of the doubling that had happened in April 2022, that was on demand, that there should be no enforcement of prepayment meters. But this is the primary method of of cowing people is being put on a prepayment meter. Most of us pay our electricity and our gas in arrears. But they actually if you get on a prepayment meter, then you're obviously you have no possibility of withdrawing payment or budgeting. You simply have to go and add money whenever you need power. And not only that, the majority of charging more per unit. So we want no enforcement of prepayment meters. And that's across the board that includes existing ones. And then the third demand is that no one should be cold this winter. And I hope no one because this is we've actually had a mild winter so far, but if the temperatures are going down now. So we can we can see that. And this is, I hope a chance for us to address the ongoing inequality that we have a proper conversation here about fair price for power in the UK. At the moment, the less electricity you use, the less power you use, the more you're paying per unit. And that's completely unfair. We need to be looking at that and ensuring that everyone could afford to heat any. And it's that involves higher rates of people who can afford it in higher energy bands and so be it. The tactic of simply not paying. This was something that was based on the successful rebellion against Margaret Thatcher's poll tax. When was that 30, 30 years ago or so? 1991. Yeah. Well, it was a three year campaign actually to be fair. Okay, but explain a bit about that and the idea of pledging as opposed to just going on strike. Because that's how your campaign works, what it has up to now, just saying that we will look like a warning, like, hey, hey, energy companies, we're going to stop paying if you don't meet our demands, but without actually doing it yet. Well, that's right. I think we needed to build a critical mass of people. We already knew that there's to say tens of hundreds of thousand people were going to be in cut the can't pay bracket. People already on prepayment meters and so on and so forth have built a safety in numbers to make it quite clear that there was no way they could take us all to court. There's no way they could enforce a prepayment meter on all of us. And that they were going to have to take notice of this. And we know they did. I mean, this is what's been really interesting is that there have been documents that have come out for information and some leaks have shown that the energy companies were directly lobbying the government effectively saying this is going to work. This is going to work. This has gone viral, which it did an enormous response, enormous response, really resonated. And they were this is and we had a lever, we had an effective lever against these people because it was an action that people could take quite a low bar of entry. So just to cancel direct debit, you don't even get a letter for 28 days. But if if thousands of people did that once that creates an enormous cash flow come problem for the companies. And that that process that was working. So without doing anything at all, you know, the most powerful punch is often the one that's not thrown without doing anything at all. We steered trust his government into scrapping the October price hike. So it worked. And whether we took our inspiration from the poll tax or about other examples more recently in Kent, actually, which is a very conservative right wing part of the country or votes consistently conservative, people engaged in a mass payment strike there last summer over the sewage being dumped on the beaches by Southern water. And that was effective in effect, the Southern water row offloads of people's energy, sorry, water bills. Water bills are typically much lower than, you know, gas or electric, but nonetheless, they were forced to back off by thousands of people in a small area, deciding that they weren't going to pay. Which is quite an interesting example. And I think that was one of the interesting things about don't pay a fucking digress slightly was the fact that it was starting to resonate well outside the usual lefty areas. Right. You had some right wing commentators, Katie Hopkins and some other people like that sort of endorsing the campaign. And as you said, there were these documents, I think it was in October that showed that the energy companies were very worried specifically about your campaign. I mean, there's a there's a there's a slide. I think I'm looking at this piece on from Open Democracy, whether they made a slide. I forget who the presentation was to maybe was sent to Tory ministers saying the don't pay campaign. What is going to be your response if this campaign goes ahead? And they actually have they've cut and pasted from your site. So it's I mean, it's very encouraging that you're kind of registering on the the establishment. Or I think they must have been folk, you know, as they do, you know, they must been hearing it in their constituency surgeries. You know, we spoke to trade union leaders, they were saying it's the membership who are coming up and talking to us about this. You know, we were getting, you know, WhatsApp groups, we can talk about mechanics and how the campaign works in a bit, but we were certainly getting interest in like, you know, rural areas where nothing radicals happen since the Civil War, you know, it was sort of for the benefit of it. We haven't had a we haven't had a civil war for 400 years. So the so but it that's that's what was really interesting here. And it was not it was outsized outside the unionized left. And I think they could see it was growing. So I think their focus groups are telling him that this was growing and was really catching on. And they had to swerve very rapidly. And I think in quite a disorganized fashion, they didn't come up with the best response to it. And in fact, that, you know, cause the problems which cause the collapse of the government effectively ends your price guarantee. Your first demand has not fully been met, though, right? I mean, that was your first demand was a return to the pre April prices. You are right. They basically all they did was scrap the October price hike. They didn't return to which is yeah, it's a partial victory. Definitely. I think it showed just what what can actually be done. You know, if you get enough people together and and actually quite a low resource campaign, really, was effectively able to steer the government in that way by tapping into a public mood. And I don't again, it was interesting what you said about Katie Hopkins. I don't know if you want to talk about that later, but that was other things I've heard from other European activists, other people I've spoken to since getting involved in this is that we took this ground for the left. We that's crucial. I think we there's been a lot of criticisms of don't pay campaign in terms of whether it's democratic, how organized it is, etc, etc. But actually, we didn't spend, you know, a year polishing a model, the perfect model of how this campaign was going to turn out. We grabbed the ball and ran with it. And I think that was really important because it is quite clear that some of the fringe right wing populist characters in this country were already thinking about a don't pay campaign. They were already thinking about cost of living crisis. And we know what their answers to the cost of living crisis would have been, would have been a tax on the concept of net zero would have been about the return of fracking, it would have been anti immigration. And this is this is what we're talking would have been talking about if these people have been allowed to seize the initiative. So I think we reacted quickly and possibly imperfectly. But nonetheless, we had the initiative. So the conversation was about what we wanted it to be about, which is about fossil fuels. It was about profits. So we agreed united out on a class basis, not a, you know, a national basis. You're pushing ahead. You're, you're there's you've got 250,000 people so far, more than 250,000 who've pledged to strike. You originally were going to strike on October the first, but you pushed it back to December the first. So tell me a bit about the tactics that have essentially, like you said, the campaign started in June. I mean, it says decentralized campaign. All these people have suddenly got together. You've obviously had a lot of a lot of media interest and even some political wins for a campaign with that's so young. Basically, it's, it's quite remarkable. Tell me a bit about how it worked, how the mechanics of it. Yeah. So I suppose the important thing, and sort of said this from the beginning, we are not building this movement. We're channeling it. And I think that's important to understand is that one of the reasons I got involved, I'm not only because I weigh energy bills went to the roof. One of the reasons I got involved was because I was hearing this conversation on the school run. I was hearing it at work. What are we going to do? What's going to happen? You know, so this, you know, it was a conversation the whole country was already having. And it was our job effectively to stick up a lightning rod and channel that down into a political movement. And that's a very different thing to try to build something from scratch. So I think that's where we're at. And I think it, in terms of the developments, obviously, we didn't go on strike from October the first, because our first demand had been partially met. And this is nothing is perfect. You know, this is a fight, you know, and so your opponent will do unexpected things that you then have to respond to. And that is very much what's happened here. I haven't got a great deal of faith in this government, if I'm brutally honest. But they are going to have to come up with a solution. We have the people power. We already know that millions of people. So this is the other thing. It wasn't just the campaign, but polling showed that up to three million people were talking about cancelling their barricade. It's huge. So there was the kind of gap, perhaps between people who just went to the point and pledged, and where the idea just lodged in people's head, and we had effectively created a social license to stop paying your energy bills. So I mean, you know, that kind of critical mass you reach where millions of people are doing it, so I can do it and it's very low risk, which I think is what you're trying to create as a moment. And I think we had penetrators to the point where that happened. Can you explain the risks that are involved? Some people are worried about their credit rating and that you can end up in court. But presumably the idea is that if so many people do this in one go, the system's going to grind to a halt. It's going to clog up the whole court system. It's not feasible. What really are the risks for individuals? I mean, yeah. So the risk is actually quite low in the sense that if you're on diet, which the majority of people pay their risk by diet, if you cancel that, you get a letter up 28 days, you get invited to pay. There's quite a lengthy process they get to before you get anywhere near court. And at that point, you can get off the train whenever you want, if you know what I mean. So kind of a rolling blockade, a mass foot dragging would work equally well. There's a very wide spectrum of going on strike. What we're asking people to do is cancel the various debits to attack the cash flow of these companies and force them as work very well to go to the government so watch your solution. And I think that's what's got them split because the actual cost they've got people under isn't a very strong one. Because they can write you a letter and a debt collector. If you wanted to string the whole thing out for six months, absolutely refuse to pay. You can choose to have your day in court, etc, etc. Then you could you so easily clock the system up. Not very many people could do that. You know, wouldn't take very many people doing it to do that. And to make the idea go viral. But if everyone demanded their day in court, that would slow the whole system down. And the whole point is if you could demand your day in court, and then and then pay the day before, if you wanted to and then still have created this massive backlog and harassment for the companies and uncertainty, which is what we're doing. But as you say, that only works when people really feel that they're not alone and that they're part of a wave of action. I think the campaign has been brilliant at creating that sense of look, it's us. It's about us on the site. You've got tips for how to help people in need. You've got lists of help lines that people can call if they're struggling to pay their bills, information about mental health, etc. I mean, it's really you get the sense from from all of the copy around this campaign, all the messaging that this is just regular people who can't do anything else. They're being pushed to their limit. They don't really want to do this. But hell, we're going to do this because they're not leaving us any other option. That's actually what has happened. I mean, yeah, it started by a small group of people, very rapidly people have come into this. Actually, some quite a wide range of political backgrounds have come into this. That's not even political backgrounds. They're not political activists, people with different sets of assumptions, perhaps have come in and fed into this. It's a very basic message, easy to understand, directly addresses a kind of material need in people's lives. And there's a certain when went viral. I tried to sign up a couple of days ago just to understand the onboarding process, if you like, of people. And you go there, you enter your postcode, you enter your email address. And it uses WhatsApp as a kind of backbone in terms of keeping people connected, which is a great choice. I mean, it's relatively platform independent. It's in your pocket. You don't have to be a member and log in and whatever. I mean, people have already got this this app on their phones. If there is an existing WhatsApp group in your postcode, for your postcode, then you're directed to it. If there isn't, you're directed to create one. Explain that choice and where does it go from there in terms of getting people organised using that system? There's two levels to this. One is pledging. And the other is agreeing to be an organiser. 32,000 people signed up for the next level up, which is being an organiser. And what that effectively meant is you would be put together with people in your area, based on postcode that you'd entered in a WhatsApp group. And that then you would then basically be left to and there's been a certain amount of work put into this to then link up with the other WhatsApp groups around you in the area and create, you know, biggest, biggest structures. And it's been interesting because some WhatsApp groups are reactive, some some not. So that and that's been but it has worked because we have 300 active WhatsApp groups. And we when we have called for decentralized protests, as we did in October the 1st, they popped up in all sorts of places. And so people have been left to come up with their own messaging, do their own recruitment. So it's been it's completely decentralized in that sense. So I think it started we threw the WhatsApp groups out there. And as the campaign goes on, it's a matter of trying to integrate those into a structure that's growing from those WhatsApp groups back up, which is kind of what's happening now. So there's a regional meetings that are going on in different parts of the country. So no sort of central the central website and so on and so forth is all just run by a small group. But there's more and more input coming from people who've arrived at the campaign through joining one of these WhatsApp groups. I mean, let's take that protest as an example. The there was a call for protest. I forget when a few weeks ago, right? October 1st, October the 1st. Sorry. Yeah, right. But it was but there was it was there was a protet. It was you're asking people to burn their bills. Correct. That so so you replace the October the 1st strike with an October the 1st bill burning protest, right? Yeah. Okay. Now, what I saw there was that there was you had sort of centralized kind of I know I'm getting into the nitty gritty a bit of how it works here. But like, you had some graphics that people could print. And an example of what it could look like the protest. And this was all this. This was a, I think, on the website, or a PDF, I forget. And also all of the legal advice, like you won't get in trouble for for burning some burning some pieces of paper kind of things. I mean, all the questions that people could have were effectively answered at that point. Like, hey, well, I haven't done this before. Could I get in trouble for doing that, etc. So I mean, it was just a symbolic protest, but burning imaginary bills or real bills. I mean, you gave people the choice. So like very difficult to set fire to an email, sadly. But yeah, it was tell me how did it end up how did it end up going? I mean, like, it went really well. I mean, what what we did was join in with or go as a block on. So so and there's another campaign in the UK called enough is enough, which a trade union led campaign, trying to kind of inspire non unionized backing for the strikes are going on at the moment. So they also called an action on October the 1st across the country. So in effect, we joined in with that across the country, and people took their burning barrels to those protests encourage people to burn their energy bills there. And other people did it independently, but there were dozens across the country that did it. Okay. And how do you I mean, one of the things that we we struggle with in terms of this decentralized campaigning idea is that people can come in kind of co-opt the the cause. You get people that are searching for political power or to raise their own profile. How do you deal with that? How do you instruct people to deal with that or guide people to deal with that? Because that's an inevitable part of any kind of political group or campaigning. How do you how do you handle it? It's a really good I mean, that is a really good question. And then so far, we've not been really confronted with any any major difficulties. I think one of the interesting things actually has been, this is me speaking personally, as you've been the big overlap with what is a huge belief system actually, which is the anti lockdown, anti vax belief system. Without getting the big, it's a very complicated phenomena. It's a sort of massive Venn diagram of overlapping beliefs, some truly noxious, some not some based on anti authoritarianism. It's really interesting, but it is huge. And I think often the left doesn't doesn't look at that. And it's something the right populists are happy to look at and exploit. And we've had a lot of people just for them, that's their common sense have come in to various what's up. So it's probably been the major challenges dealing with that, having a policy, trying to have a say to people, look, you know, we might we might not agree on, you know, on everything or indeed anything else, but we're here for one purpose. So a very clear, this is what we're here for, we are here for energy bills. And not getting beyond that has kind of helped keep the campaign on track. As I say, and I think it's actually the seeding of a campaign, the sort of the base assumptions that go into it from the very small group of people who set it up, they're not there centrally directing it anymore. But that that sort of built into it from the beginning, it's in its DNA, basically, and that I think was very important. And that that I don't know if there's any sort of political powers to be gained and don't pay from co-opting it. Maybe there is, I don't know. How do you marry that, that decentralized model that you just described, you said, I mean, the people that originally set it up on on no longer, I mean, it's it's it's running on its own steam now, basically, with, I mean, let's take, let's take a given take, you know, there's a protest, okay, and there's some media that are coming there. And we know that there's going to be some buzz and the social media hashtag, etc. And it's a protest that you've organized. And then suddenly, later people show up with their own banner about something else, you know, looking to looking to get in on some of that on some of that profile raising. How do you how do you handle that? Like, if it's decentralized, how do you go? Look, sorry, guys. No, this is not this is not going to work. Like, what kind of well, in effect, we couldn't. I mean, I think you're right. That is a potential weakness of the model. Um, genuinely, I think I think you're right. That sort of thing could happen, or we could have a road don't pay group quite easily. That could be that could happen. You know, that somebody could be in a WhatsApp group and have politics, so we're completely opposed to mine. And how, you know, that would be something to grapple with. I think I think possibly streamlining the media appearances through one office, that's been good. So we had an enormous amount of mainstream media interest at the beginning. And there was a spokesperson program. So you get actual authentic voices, rather than sort of the sort of semi celebrity influencer left-wing spokesperson model, which we've had in the UK up till now, really. So we sort of bypassed that and tried to get people from local groups from different areas, different backgrounds, and get them to be our spokespeople. So there's no one face associated with Don't Pay UK. Which is a real strength of it, I think. You go on the site, there's not this sort of usual kind of about section with a load of people in their CVs faces and, you know, nice photos. So I think that's very powerful. But then that brings me to a question about money. How do you pay for basic things like materials and for the protests? Local groups fundraise. So we've definitely done that. There was a lot of donations came in, actually. It's a very low-budget camp, but I don't know, let's sort of pick an example, a green piece or something that would spend millions on a campaign. It's not like that at all. I think we're talking in the low, tens of thousands have been spent, I mean, low, probably under $30,000 all-told has been spent on this campaign. But yeah, donations came in at the beginning, quite a lot, and more than people were expecting. So that's enabled the, but that's all gone straight back out. Millions of leaflets, hundreds of thousands of stickers were printed, distributed for your charge to people or for a nominal fee, and that's where the money went. I see. Okay. And what's the future then for Don't Pay? Because you've got 250,000 people who have pledged after the December 1st strike, whatever happens. What's the next step? I mean, obviously, it depends very much on the fork on the road is going to be what do they do about energy bills. That's going to be the big fork in the road. And I will be personally speaking, I'm going to be quite surprised if something, they're not going to let it rip again. Very unlikely, I feel, that the government is going to walk into exactly the same trap as they did in October 1st, where they were forced into a panic to response. That seems that they're not going to do that. They will address this in some way, and then we will have to address that. That seems to me the likeliest outcome. Let's see what comes out in this mini budget. Let's see what they're proposing come April. Whether we call off or go on strike on December 1st, we'll be dependent on that. What's on the table? I don't know to what extent, personally, I hope this doesn't sort of ossify into anything. I think this is a moment. We've channeled this movement. I hope we've shown, and the example is what I'd like to shout from the rooftops, is this works. Actually, the powers that be are not as powerful as you think they are. If you get enough people together, and you do this, and you work in a decentralized way, then you can win. With quite low resources, if you pick your moments, you can win. And that's what I'd like the takeaway to be for people. Now, whatever coalitions or ideas or whatever come after this, and we are still looking whatever happens with this mini budget or the next year, we're looking at, and there's no promise coming from the Labour Party either, really, other than just more years of austerity. That's what we're looking at, and the sort of continual trajectory into crisis after crisis our societies are experiencing. I'm hoping that people can learn it if you band together and act in this way. We can win, and we can win for people further down the social scale. Change is possible. Okay. Well, that's great. I mean, I'm conscious of time here. Could you just tell, for the benefit of people listening, tell them what are the first steps for people to get involved with, don't pay resources, points of contact, etc. So, really, please visit our website, don'tpay.uk. Pledge, well, read the resources first and decide if it's for you, but then pledge. It doesn't matter if you're on a pre-payment, whatever your situation is, just pledge, join in, help organise, help spread the strike. And that's what I'd like people to do. Great. Simon Howard, thank you very much indeed for your time. It's been fascinating talking to you, and best of luck with the campaign. Really appreciate you coming in today and opening the hood to explain how it all works, and good luck with it. Thank you very much.