Slow burning.

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“It is time to change, and if we do not change something stronger than us is going to do it for us. We know this from experience.”

— Arkan Lushwala

“Democracy is a problem that capital is always trying to solve.”

— George Monbiot

Last autumn, whilst back in London for a family wedding, I went for a pub lunch with my wife, our son and a friend. I arrived a little after the others and went to the bar to order my meal. Seeing an array of beer pumps in front of me, I decided to treat myself to a pint. It was Sunday afternoon, and we were on holiday after all.

After I paid, I gawped at the receipt the barmaid handed me. My pint of beer cost £10 pounds. TEN POUNDS. This was a pub on a nondescript and busy south London road, between two ordinary suburbs. A nice, welcoming pub for sure, but not a fancy joint in the heart of Mayfair or Chelsea.

Since I don’t drink much these days, I think of having a beer as a treat, almost like ordering a dessert. But even so, I’d baulk at paying £10 for a dessert. Here in Berlin, the equivalent would be paying €12 for a large beer, something I’m not even sure is possible to do, unless there’s a 6-star hotel hidden somewhere.

TEN POUNDS!! As you can probably tell, I still talk about it now, even though I’m quite certain my wife is bored of hearing about it. And yet, although it was a shock, it was not a complete surprise.

When I left London, it was at the back end of the Covid pandemic. As pubs and restaurants re-opened, I’d noticed the sudden jump in prices; a beer in one of my local pubs, on a backstreet in another south London suburb, had leapt up to £6.50. My old consulting mind rationalised it - hospitality venues needed to cover their costs and recover income, having been closed for so long. The price of raw ingredients for things like beer had also increased for a number of reasons.

Almost five years later, in that pub for lunch, more had changed. Wars, ongoing climate breakdown, and the impact of Brexit had all combined to make many things more expensive. But still, seeing the jump in price was like ice water in the face. When I mentioned this to my friends in London, they seemed unperturbed and shrugged it off.

Now let me talk about chocolate bars. We all know they were not only much cheaper when we were kids, but much bigger too. A common business school or interview question is to ask how a company can maintain or increase the profit on a penny sweet if the cost of making it has gone up. You can’t increase the price without at least doubling it; it is then also no longer a penny sweet. The answer, of course, is to slightly reduce the size of the sweet so it costs less to make.

Years ago, I met a man whose job title had a euphemistic quality to it, something like ‘FMCG Optimisation Consultant’. When I asked him what that meant in plain English, he explained that his role was to solve the penny sweet challenge for food companies. In practice, this meant things like not only subtly reducing the size over time, but also changes to production processes and switching ingredients to cheaper, often artificial, alternatives.

All of this would happen gradually, and most consumers would either not notice or notice a small difference but not be sufficiently bothered to change their buying behaviour. A Snickers bar in the UK is now roughly half the size it used to be when I was a kid, and no doubt filled with cheaper ingredients too.

Now, let me talk about TV football rights. Stay with me, I know you’re playing the role of my patient wife here, and this does go somewhere. In the UK, the broadcasting rights for professional football were effectively privatised in 1992. Live games that had previously been shown on terrestrial (non-cable) TV would now be shown on the new satellite TV channel, BSkyB (now Sky). This meant the top league would no longer share revenues so widely with lower leagues, and would sell broadcast rights independently, maximising their income.

At the time, there was much furore amongst football fans about what this would do to the game and their access to it, something I was too young to fully appreciate (although I later wrote my undergraduate thesis about it). In brief, something predictable happened. At first, a selection of games was shown on Sky. One single monthly subscription meant you had access to these games, although it was bundled with hundreds of other channels, which you also had to pay for.

A few years later, a second ‘package’ of Premier League games was sold to another broadcaster, meaning a second subscription. Anticipating the complaints from football fans and subscribers, the league insisted that only a small number of less popular games would be shown on this channel. Once again, this changed. The league began to sell multiple packages of TV rights in an auction, each of which had a growing number of games within it - and, importantly, the popular and less popular games quietly began to get mixed across these packages.

The same thing happened with European football competitions. Where once, English teams playing in the Champions League were broadcast for free, these games gradually began to be auctioned and shown on paid-for channels. Now, the Champions League is only shown on subscription channels, and this year, for the first time ever in the UK, the European Cup final, the biggest club game in the world, was not shown on a free-to-air channel.

So, a little over 30 years after the inception of all this, watching an English football team play domestically and in Europe now means no less than four separate subscriptions, totalling well over £1,000 a year.

Now let me talk about airport baggage trolleys. Last year, we travelled back to the UK, landing at Manchester airport. Although we pack light when we travel, a rucksack and various toddler paraphernalia begin to feel heavy on a long walk through an airport. I saw a row of baggage trolleys and was about to dump some bags on them when I noticed I would have to pay £1 for the privilege of using a baggage trolley for a few minutes. Inexplicably, the charge in Euros was double the amount.

“They can fuck off”, I said to my wife, hoisting my rucksack back onto my shoulders. Once again, I commented on it frequently over the next few weeks (every now and then marvelling at my wife’s willingness to listen).

The “they” I was referring to was not some generic entity. It was, and is, the business models which continually seek ways to atomise everyday human behaviour, privatise it and charge people for something that was once, and should be free. Airport operators are huge businesses, which are usually shareholder and private equity owned, meaning they continually need to find ways to extract profit from people moving through the infrastructure they now own, such as the simple act of pushing your heavy bags on a trolley.

I could bore on with many more examples: drinking water, domestic energy, trains, healthcare, the price of food, and more. All of them are victims of gradual declines in quality and reliability, whilst the cost continually rises.

All of them are central to a basic standard of life, and in many cases, essential. As hard as it is to believe, water companies are often owned by private equity companies in foreign countries.

Back in 2006, the behavioural scientist Dan Gilbert wrote an op-ed about global warming in the L.A. Times. One of the several reasons he gave for our inertia on tackling it was our inability to see it as a real threat.

The problem, he memorably wrote, is not that the planet is warming too fast but not fast enough, and we are unable or unwilling to anticipate long-term consequences: “we see it as a threat to our futures - not our afternoons... Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly.”

The question here is about what we notice and what we’re willing to accept. We’re all susceptible to becoming the boiling frogs; it is no coincidence that some of what I describe above I noticed only because of gaps in experience, like living somewhere else for a while.

In our not noticing and in our inaction, rests a huge amount - our very survival, in fact. Each time we shrug and ignore things, there is a small but powerful capitulation. There is a tiny giving away of our rights, of fairness, a subtle but compounding effect of lowering our standards.

It is very easy to accept each seemingly small change, to just rub along, grin and bear it, swallow the cost. Each time, we are too focused on the individual, seemingly discrete change, and blind to the bigger dynamic. It is what the change represents rather than what it means right now.

If we focus on the principle and the trend instead of the individual change, we’re able to perceive something that was obscured. And how we respond to the principle signals what we are willing to tolerate. If we stop buying the penny sweets or protest the rise in water prices because we know we’re being slowly ripped off, something different is possible.

Who are we signalling to? Those who hold the power and capital that shape our lives. The people who truly understand this are the activists and protestors who, throughout history, have fought on the basis of principles, especially when they are not yet directly impacted by them. They can see that to accept something small now, however tempting, is to take a fork in the road towards an undesirable fate.

This is the principle Pastor Niemöller understood too, that what we are willing to tolerate for others, is eventually what we must be willing to tolerate ourselves.

If it’s acceptable for our rulers to visit brutality on the people ‘over there’, then we must recognise that one day brutality will be visited on us by the same people. The principle has been established through our passive acceptance of it.

Whether we like it or not, each of our choices, actions or inaction is a vote for a certain type of future.

“All true change, deep change, comes through a fundamental change in our view of reality, our recognition of “what is.””

— Andrew Beaulac

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

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• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

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[main image by Kristi McCluer/Reuters]