Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is to back the growing Enough is Enough movement, whose leaders are planning dozens of rallies against the cost of living crisis which they say will result in people dying.
Burnham’s support indicates a widening political base to a campaign that now has close to 450,000 supporters after it was set up earlier this month by trade union leaders, including the RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, who said he wanted to “turn anger into action”.
Burnham, a former Labour health secretary viewed as a centrist, joins a group with a growing network of local activists in more than 70 towns and cities, from Crawley to Blackpool.
Its demands include a cut to the energy price cap to the pre-April level of £1,277 a year, a real-terms public sector pay rise, a reverse to the national insurance hike, and a £20-a-week universal credit increase – a programme that could cost more than £100bn a year.
It is planning 50 rallies in the next month after the expected announcement on Friday of a rise in the energy price cap to £3,553 a year, which is forecast to increase further to £4,500 in January – when the poorest families using pre-payment meters could face unaffordable bills of £613 for that month alone. Thousands of households could have their power cut off and millions more are predicted to plunge into utilities arrears.
“It is growing at such a rate we have had to update our database infrastructure,” said Chris Webb, head of communications at the Communication Workers Union, which is helping organise the movement. “There is potential for us to call our own mass demonstrations.”
The movement is in talks with premier league footballers and household-name actors to boost its profile. Another lead organiser, Ian Byrne, the Labour MP for Liverpool, West Derby, said the coming crisis was “like the blitz” and a comparable threat to Covid-19.
“We are dealing with maybe 35 million people being plunged into fuel poverty,” he said. “Let’s be brutal. People are going to die. People can’t afford to eat, they can’t afford to put the heating on.”
But with other groups organising direct actions such as blockades of petrol stations and a mass refusal to pay energy bills, Enough is Enough is facing criticism for being too conventional in calling for the government to change policy, and too broad in its demands.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said its call for a inflation-matching public sector pay rise would cost an extra £19bn a year, and the Fabian Society thinktank said the proposed energy bill cuts could cost £75bn a year, with the universal credit increase costing £4bn a year.
Andrew Harrop, the general secretary of the Fabian Society, said the movement had “perfectly sensible long-term campaign asks but it doesn’t stack up as a first aid kit to help people right now.
“People who don’t engage in politics are desperately worried,” he said. “But I would be sceptical whether a conventional campaign from the far left of politics will push the right buttons to get a response from unpoliticised middle Britain.”
Mikey Valentine, a bouncer in Bridgwater who last month led direct actions blockading petrol stations and an Esso refinery over fuel prices, said he knew about the campaign but thought “if they are just going to rally people they are not going to get very far”.
“There is no point asking the government to do something,” he said. “You need to show them, force them to do something”.
Another campaign, called Don’t Pay UK, has said it will coordinate a mass movement to cancel energy direct debits from 1 October if 1 million people sign up. By Wednesday this week, 113,582 people had shown support. In 1990 more than 17 million people refused to pay the poll tax. Simon Howard, a self-employed tradesman, a local coordinator in the Midlands, said the idea was to create “safety in numbers”, and the message was spreading through Facebook and WhatsApp groups.
“There’s villages in Wiltshire with [Don’t Pay] WhatsApp groups where nothing radical has happened since the civil war,” he said.
One of the Enough is Enough leaders, Nick Ballard, head organiser at Acorn, a community action group, said: “It is not an organisation we are trying to build but a movement.
“People are starting to form their own Enough is Enough groups outside the big cities,” he said, citing groups in Southend and Basingstoke. “They are not the traditional leftwing activists, they are ordinary people. We are providing the platform for people to start organising and take on these issues.”
He said the campaign would also channel people to take part in existing community groups dealing with food poverty and housing to boost resilience.
