Supervision vs demolition: on the limits of appeal
Watching a costs catastrophe unfold in court, and what it teaches about my own legal fight
Executive Summary
A grandfather has lived on a diesel generator for three years after being disconnected from the electricity grid. He challenged the legality of that disconnection. He lost — not on the merits of the disconnection itself, but in a procedural costs war that ended with a £50,000 liability, a “Totally Without Merit” finding, and a civil restraint order.
This article is not a plea of innocence. It is an examination of how courts prioritise finality over doctrinal purity, how litigants in person are destroyed by procedural escalation, and why demanding demolition of past orders is treated differently from seeking supervision of authority.
It is also a warning: when utilities entrusted with safety-of-life infrastructure combine legal hardball with reputational indifference, the human cost is severe — and avoidable.
There is a cleaner exit available. The question is whether anyone will take it.
On Monday morning I sat in court as a public observer and watched a friend be ground down by a process that calls itself justice. It was not dramatic. There were no raised voices, no theatrical flourishes. Just the quiet, methodical force of the legal machine doing what it does best: proceeding.
I have written before about Andrew Stephenson’s long-running dispute with Northern Powergrid — a conflict that has left him living on a diesel generator for three years after the cable to his home was severed.
Man vs contract: English energy gangsterism [Feb 2023]
“People think I don’t care, but I do” [Apr 2024]
“You first, pops!” [Jan 2025]
Northern Terrorgrid’s spiteful PR problem [Mar 2025]
Andrew argues the disconnection was not merely administrative, but punitive: retaliation for helping commercial clients challenge what he believed to be systemic over-charging, and for identifying a lawful route to direct energy supply that bypassed the established billing structure. In short, he challenged the system — and the system responded.
But this is not a simple morality play.
Large utilities are not cartoon villains, and litigants are not always martyrs. Institutions have duties. Networks have rules. Courts operate within constraints. The law is a blunt instrument, and it is not designed to reward cleverness or rebellion — even when they expose uncomfortable truths.
What I witnessed this week was not just a dispute about cables and contracts. It was a demonstration of the limits of law itself: what it can adjudicate, what it cannot recognise, and the cost of pursuing vindication when peace might be cheaper.
There is a cautionary dimension here. The system can be unjust in effect without being unlawful in form. And individuals who set out to correct perceived wrongs can find themselves trapped in an escalation that consumes years, money, energy — and sometimes, perspective.
This article is not a cheerleading brief for either side. It is an attempt to understand how a dispute over electricity became a three-year exile from the grid, and what that tells us about power — corporate, legal, and human.
This particular hearing was an appeal by Andrew against an order that he pay Northern Powergrid’s costs — then standing at around £40,000. For a grandfather nearing retirement on a modest income, having already spent some £20,000 on diesel just to keep his home functioning off-grid, it is not a trivial sum. It is existential.
Over three years the litigation has generated around thirty court orders. There have been hearings, applications, directions, and compliance battles. Court fees alone run into many thousands of pounds. Whatever the original dispute, it has metastasised into process.
But to describe this solely as a morality play — plucky individual versus corporate behemoth — would be misleading. The legal system is not calibrated for righteousness. It is calibrated for procedural rigour. That difference is everything.
Courts do not ask, “Who feels wronged?” They ask, “What was pleaded? What was served? What was proven? What order was properly made?” Procedure is not decoration; it is architecture. If you cannot navigate it precisely, you do not get to the merits.
In that sense Andrew’s conflict mirrors my own, though the trajectories differ. In both cases the underlying impulse is similar: if authority is defective, consequences cannot lawfully follow. If a party was not properly joined, if jurisdiction was not properly established, if process was not properly observed — then downstream orders are unstable.
The divergence lies in posture.
Andrew’s strategy has been one of demolition. He argues that foundational defects — particularly the formal status of Northern Powergrid within earlier proceedings — render subsequent orders unsafe. His remedy seeks collapse of what has already been built.
My own approach has been supervisory. I am not asking for demolition of completed structures. I am asking for access to the staircases — restoration of normal routes of review, appeal, and scrutiny. Where Andrew challenges the validity of the edifice, I challenge the locking of the doors.
The system reacts differently to those two postures. Demolition is perceived as attack. Supervision is framed as housekeeping. One triggers defensive consolidation. The other can, at least in theory, be accommodated.
What Monday demonstrated is that once litigation becomes recursive — once every order generates an application about the previous order — the human question recedes and the procedural matrix takes over. Costs follow events. Non-compliance compounds. Judges prioritise finality.
There is a lesson here that is uncomfortable but real: the law rewards those who can endure its tempo, not necessarily those who feel most wronged by its origin.
To summarise Andrew’s case overall: he sought reconnection to the electricity grid, and damages that were moderate but not trivial. The core grievance was simple and intelligible. The remedy sought was not outlandish. But the way the litigation unfolded proved fatal.
First, Andrew appears to have sued the wrong party. He pursued the CEO of Northern Powergrid personally for acting ultra vires, rather than the corporate entity. Northern Powergrid, for its part, positioned itself as merely an agent — pointing towards Octopus Energy as the relevant principal. That may sound like corporate hairsplitting, but in law it is not. If you sue the wrong defendant, you can lose even if the underlying complaint has substance.
Second, the case arguably became over-expanded. What began as a dispute about disconnection, reconnection, and compensation drifted into wider territory: governance, regulatory capture, and the structural corruption of the energy market. Those themes may be valid in the court of public opinion — and even in Parliament — but they are toxic inside ordinary civil litigation. Courts are not built to adjudicate “civil society issues”. They are built to adjudicate pleaded causes of action against properly identified parties, within tight procedural boundaries.
Third, Andrew made multiple procedural missteps. In isolation, procedural errors can sometimes be forgiven. But in complex, prolonged litigation, they compound. The more the process becomes tangled, the more the court’s focus shifts away from the moral centre of the dispute and towards case management, compliance, and finality.
Add to that a corporate hardball stance by Northern Powergrid, and the predictable result is costs escalation. The longer the fight continues, the more the economics begin to dominate the merits. This is one of the system’s cruellest realities: the party with deeper pockets can afford to turn procedure into attrition.
There were also technical issues over whether Northern Powergrid was ever properly a party to the proceedings at all, and over how the case was allocated within the costs regime. Those points may sound arcane, but they matter. Litigation does not merely decide what is true; it decides what is properly before the court.
The outcome was catastrophic for Andrew.
He lost. He was hit with a further costs order of around £10,000. The court recorded a “Totally Without Merit” adjudication. And a civil restraining order was imposed to prevent further appeals.
For a layman pursuing what he believed to be a serious wrong, that is the legal equivalent of being not merely defeated, but silenced.
Was it unfair? Arguably, yes — in the sense that there were real doctrinal issues here that deserved careful scrutiny. But was it procedurally unreasonable? Not obviously. And that distinction — between substantive justice and procedural legitimacy — is where many litigants are broken.
My own case stands in contrast — and instructively so.
I faced coercive State enforcement for a minor motoring matter, initiated under the Single Justice Procedure and later transferred to a full court hearing. As the matter progressed, something unusual emerged: multiple court identities began appearing in the paperwork, not obviously grounded in statute and not clearly related to one another.
The question for me was never primarily, “Am I guilty?” It was, “To whom is this conviction attributable?” Which court, precisely, exercised judicial authority? Under what statutory footing? And how is that authority sequenced before enforcement follows?
Those are not rhetorical questions. They are structural ones.
To resolve them, I invoked multiple statutory routes: a Case Stated under s.111 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act; an application under s.142; and associated procedural steps that should, in theory, allow questions of law and jurisdiction to be clarified before enforcement becomes final. In practice, none of those mechanisms have functioned cleanly.
That is why my Judicial Review claim is procedural rather than combative. It is not an attempt to relitigate the merits of the underlying offence. It is an attempt to prevent enforcement from outrunning adjudication. If the law provides supervisory pathways, they must operate before the State crystallises liability and penalty.
The broader “ghost court” hypothesis — that the Single Justice Procedure’s attribution of judicial authority may be under-configured or improperly grounded — is controversial, and potentially destabilising. But I have not leapt directly to that systemic conclusion in a single bound.
Instead, the issue has been disaggregated and structured.
A Case Stated to examine the law as applied to me.
A Judicial Review to ensure procedural sequencing and lawful supervision.
A Part 8 claim to anchor the constitutional question of attribution and authority.
Each component is “impedance matched” to what the system can properly hear within its own architecture. The build-up is disciplined. It sits within the grammar of the system itself.
The ultimate outcome may be modest — clarification, sequencing, correction. Or it may be more significant. It is conceivable that aspects of the Single Justice Procedure are found to be under-specified or unlawful in configuration. But that is not asserted as a slogan. It is approached as a question, incrementally, within recognised legal forms.
If the courts ultimately refuse to engage with those forms, the issue will not be obscured by procedural sprawl. It will stand exposed as a refusal of supervision, not as a muddled grievance.
That distinction — between disciplined escalation and uncontrolled proliferation — is the hinge on which these two stories turn.
What is common to both cases is not personality, or even subject-matter. It is the question of limits of authority — and what happens when power exceeds its remit.
In Andrew’s case:
Did Northern Powergrid act unilaterally — not as a mere agent of Octopus — to exact a form of extra-judicial punishment against Andrew for exposing over-charging to commercial clients seeking new installations?
Did the Court, at an earlier stage, exceed its proper role by awarding costs without first allocating the case to a costs-bearing track, leaving Andrew in procedural limbo and unable to predict the financial consequences of continuing?
Did the judge this week go beyond his authority by marking the appeal “Totally Without Merit” when there was, at minimum, an arguable issue of law — namely that Northern Powergrid had not filed the paperwork required to join itself formally as a party, while nonetheless seeking the benefits of party status?
In my own case:
Did Cumbria Constabulary have lawful power to charge me when there was no personalised accusation against me, and no evidence on the face of the file that a crime involving me had occurred?
Did the Magistrates’ Court exceed its jurisdiction by proceeding on a summons in the name of an entity that appears to function as a case-processing label for IT systems — rather than something that fits the statutory grammar of a court?
Did HMCTS outrun its authority by enforcing a fine when an appeal route was not processed, and a judicial review seeking a stay was already in progress?
These are not matters of balance, or discretion, or judicial temperament. They are hard boundaries of the rule of law.
It is normal for aggrieved litigants to reach for jurisdictional arguments — whether framed as jurisdiction, seisin, attribution, or nullity — because they feel morally non-negotiable. If the authority is defective, consequences cannot lawfully follow. If there is nullity, the adverse consequences should disappear.
But there is a danger here.
Courts increasingly treat such arguments as existential threats. They experience them not as technical questions within the legal order, but as attacks on the legal order itself. And when a system feels existentially threatened, it tends to prioritise continuity of operation over purity of doctrine — even if that requires simulating law rather than enacting it.
That is the uncomfortable frontier where both these cases now sit.
Andrew’s case sits firmly in the realm of private law — and his posture appears to have triggered an immune response. In that environment, the costs machine is not a side-effect. It is the enforcement mechanism.
Northern Powergrid’s position was, in the narrow legal sense, defensible. But morally it was less than honourable. They worked steadily to reclassify Andrew not as a wronged customer with an arguable dispute, but as a serial and vexatious litigant. Their own procedural lapses were treated as trivial. His were treated as fatal. That asymmetry is not unique to this case; it is a structural feature of litigation between an individual and a corporate defendant with institutional competence.
The County Court is not the Supreme Court. Its governing values are not doctrinal purity or constitutional hygiene. They are finality, continuity, and discretionary case management. An oath-bound constitutional purist might have been tempted to entertain Andrew’s arguments at their highest level. But that is, in practice, aspirational.
In reality, Northern Powergrid’s status as a party to the proceedings had drifted. It was arguably one way, and arguably the other. Whether that could be converted from narrative truth into hard law is another matter — but it was not an absurd proposition.
Andrew’s final appeal application was also technically late. There may have been valid reasons for that — he was caught in a procedural maze with multiple forks and technical dead-ends. This was not straightforward terrain, even for experienced litigators. Andrew asks: “Was I late — or was it impossible to be early?”
But lateness in civil litigation functions as a procedural solvent: it dissolves doctrine. It allows even serious points to be treated as stale, inconvenient, and contrary to the overriding objective.
In that context, the “Totally Without Merit” label reads less like a finding on the merits and more like a reflex to a class of challenge. It feels personal — even humiliating — but it is not really about Andrew’s character or the moral arc of his stance. It is about the emotional and operational state of the system under pressure, and its instinct to suppress anything that threatens finality.
That is the deeper lesson: in private law, the machine does not need to refute you. It only needs to manage you.
My own situation is comparable in that it also turns on arguments of nullity. But it is foundationally different in character, because it is located in public criminal law.
In private disputes, doctrinal purism is often treated as inconvenient. In criminal law, it is at least tolerated — because coercion is involved. The clearest illustration is the writ of habeas corpus. It reduces everything to an atomic question: by what authority do you detain this person? Show the warrant. Show the jurisdiction. Show the legal basis.
That coercive backdrop changes the calibration. When liberty or penal sanction is engaged, the State must justify itself with a level of rigour that does not ordinarily apply to family fallouts or contract disputes. Whether that distinction is philosophically perfect is beside the point; it is embedded in the structure of the law.
Under those circumstances, the Administrative Court operates with different governing values than the County Court. Its concerns are supervision, legality, and sequencing. It exists to ensure that public power remains within statutory and constitutional bounds.
The questions I raise are anterior: attribution and seisin. Which judicial body exercised authority? At what moment did it become seized of the matter? And how does enforcement follow from that lawful act? These are not merits questions. They are preconditions.
The longer the matter proceeds, the more the State is required to articulate and defend its position in writing. Each response narrows the field. Each defence crystallises tensions that require adjudication. It becomes progressively harder to characterise the concerns as frivolous while simultaneously engaging with them in detail.
The strategy is therefore not demolition, but alignment. I am working with the grain of the system. It seeks finality. I do not resist finality. But finality presupposes lawful attribution. Without that, it is merely administrative closure.
And administrative closure is not the same thing as justice.
This brings us to the crux of the matter.
To hold power to account, one must first define the boundary of remit — and then determine whether what occurred is an undershoot (a failure to perform a duty) or an overshoot (an exercise of power without lawful authority or attribution).
Once framed that way, two distinct postures appear.
Supervision: narrow, anterior, forward-looking, seeking restraint of enforcement.
Demolition: retrospective, consequence-unwinding, destabilising of the existing order.
Both can be legitimate. But they are not received equally.
Courts are not truth engines with a possibility of finality. They are finality engines with a possibility of truth. Their primary function is not metaphysical correctness; it is social closure. They exist to stop disputes from expanding indefinitely or becoming vigilantism. Truth is welcome — but only insofar as it can be metabolised without destroying continuity.
This is where the trade-off becomes unavoidable. The more we demand formal, traceable, accountable authority — aligned with Logos, in the sense of reason, coherence, and lawful attribution — the more we threaten throughput. And throughput is not a dirty word. It is what keeps a material society functioning.
What can appear, from the outside, as corruption is often the necessary hardening of dishonour into a limited form of peace: finality. That may be spiritually disturbing. But it is, on its own terms, justifiable. A system cannot survive if every error reopens every settled outcome.
This creates a paradox.
The more correct the demolition argument, the more threatening it becomes to the system. The larger the overshoot or undershoot of authority, the greater the institutional resistance to having it named.
That is why Andrew’s appeal was slapped down so hard. Not because his arguments were self-evidently absurd, but because they risked trapping the judge in a corner. To acknowledge the point would be to invite an unravelling — not just of one order, but of the logic by which the case had been managed.
A “courageous” judge might have entertained the arguments. But even then, Northern Powergrid would likely have found favour on appeal, where higher courts often reassert finality over finesse. Not because they love corporations, but because they love closure.
And closure is the system’s first religion.
Which brings us to a deeper understanding of the limits of appeal itself — and its relationship to rightness in law versus righteousness in spirit.
An appeal is not an opportunity to re-assert that truth has been denied, honour besmirched, or goodness lost. It is not a second bite at moral reality. It is a procedural machine: a system of gates, time limits, permitted routes, accepted labels, and constrained discretion.
Litigants have to grasp the difference between matters that are generically arguable in law, and matters that are permitted to be argued now.
That distinction sounds pedantic until you experience it. But it is the difference between being heard and being struck out. Between an arguable point and a “Totally Without Merit” label. Between correction and closure.
A truthful and righteous outcome is possible — but only if it is established inside each “box” the law operates in, so that those boxes compose correctly. Jurisdiction, joinder, limitation, allocation, permission, costs, appeal routes: each is a compartment with its own rules. If one compartment is compromised, you cannot necessarily repair it from another compartment later. The system does not behave like a single coherent truth-finding process. It behaves like a chain of procedural stages, each of which can lock in outcomes.
In Andrew’s case, his indignation at what he saw as a moral collapse by Northern Powergrid may have coloured a determination to seek vindication. And vindication is a dangerous fuel in civil litigation. It gives energy — but it also drives escalation beyond what the forum can tolerate.
The initial judge warned Andrew that he faced a “world of hurt on costs” if he continued, particularly given the foundational misstep on defendant identity. That same issue persisted, unresolved, to the end.
Rather than becoming a lesson in disciplined framing — narrowing, correcting, and rebuilding the case within the court’s grammar — it has fallen into the familiar pattern by which litigants in person are destroyed by the system. Not necessarily because they are wrong on the underlying moral facts, but because they cannot navigate the procedural terrain that determines what the court is allowed to do.
And in the end, procedure eats principle.
There is a deeper spiritual dimension to what I witnessed on Monday.
At one level, the outcome for Andrew feels uncomfortably close to theft — not because it was necessarily unlawful, but because it compounded the original injury through legal regularisation. A corporate actor that has already imposed severe practical hardship is now awarded tens of thousands of pounds, with the court’s authority serving as the mechanism of extraction.
The moral asymmetry is difficult to ignore. If the case had gone the other way, Northern Powergrid would very likely have argued that it was not liable for costs precisely because it had not been properly joined as a party. That is not reciprocity. It is not “do unto others”. And whether or not the law permits it, it is the kind of manoeuvre that has to be accounted for at the level of conscience.
That said, Andrew’s own pursuit of remedy was not free of moral ambiguity.
At one stage, party names were reportedly altered in pen and ink in court, even though the underlying documents were not subsequently sealed and served in the way the system ordinarily requires. This created a strange liminal zone: a reality that existed in the room, but not in the record. Andrew continued to press the case through that ambiguity, and the longer he did so, the more the moral clarity of his stance became diluted.
In principle, he may have had a far larger claim than the one he pursued. The alleged negligent severing of an earth cable, combined with reported electric shocks, raises issues far more serious than contractual inconvenience. In another forum, and with a different posture, one could imagine claims framed around safety and duty of care.
Yet the damages sought in this litigation — while not extravagant — could also be read as opportunistic rather than strictly necessary in the moment. That does not make Andrew wicked. It makes him human.
Sin is not simply vice. It is self-will.
And when self-will meets professional exploitation — when an individual’s determination collides with an institution’s ability to weaponise process — the consequences are ugly. The law does not purify the situation. It amplifies it.
It would be easy to rage at the outcome. It is tempting, even. But a cooler clarity reveals something more useful: lessons and opportunities for growth — for all parties, including the bench.
Because the point is not merely who “won”. It is what kind of people we become in the pursuit of being right.
There is, however, a twist in the tail of this story — though I am not presently at liberty to disclose its details.
It is enough to say that Andrew’s dispute with Northern Powergrid is not confined to the domestic supply narrative that has dominated the litigation so far. There exists a distinct and potentially more concrete claim, anchored not in abstraction or systemic grievance, but in property rights arising from land ownership.
The irony is sharp.
Andrew found himself fighting a high-variance procedural costs war over arguments about party status, allocation, and legal attribution — all important, but structurally fragile in the hands of a litigant in person facing a well-resourced corporate defendant. Meanwhile, a more grounded, asset-based claim sat in the background, constrained by timing and sequencing.
The meta-lesson is stark: do not litigate abstractions when you possess assets.
Courts are far more comfortable adjudicating concrete interference with land than systemic critique of institutional conduct. Property rights sit on bedrock. Procedural doctrine sits on sand unless handled with surgical precision.
That does not mean the earlier arguments were foolish. It means they were strategically misaligned with the terrain.
And so, while this chapter has closed badly for Andrew in the County Court, it would be premature to regard the matter as concluded. Corporate defendants may secure procedural victories, but that does not place them beyond accountability if distinct and properly framed claims exist.
This story is not over.
Nor are consequences always distributed in the order that litigation first suggests.
Watching this hearing unfold, I took away multiple lessons for my own case.
Courts are in the business of continuity. Constitutional language and conservative values are adopted insofar as they serve that objective. Anything that disrupts continuity at a local level can only be entertained if it preserves continuity at a higher level.
Several practical rules follow.
First: never ask a court to demolish history unless you are forced. Frame relief as minimal supervision. Courts will tolerate oversight far more readily than they will tolerate consequence-unwinding.
Second: keep claims small. There is moral clarity in narrow relief. Large claims invite suspicion, and they tempt the court into treating the litigant as driven by grievance rather than principle.
Third: keep arguments anterior. Do not ambush. Do not arrive late with “clever points”. Even true doctrine becomes radioactive when it appears as last-minute disruption.
Fourth: make the questions binary. The more a point can be framed as a hard boundary — lawful or unlawful, attributable or not, seized or not — the less it collapses into discretionary balancing, where institutional instinct favours closure.
Fifth: be explicit about what you seek. Vagueness creates space for the opposing party to mischaracterise your position, and for the court to resolve the uncertainty by defaulting to finality.
Finally: treat finality as dependent on attribution, not opposed to it. Work with the system’s core values. Do not posture as an enemy of closure. Insist only that closure presupposes lawful authority.
That is the difference between being heard and being crushed.
Lastly, a few words in the register of my earlier writing: not legal scruples, but human cost.
Andrew has been living on a diesel generator for years, through no fault of his own. The original warrant to remove his meter was, on any reasonable view, at least questionable. Whatever the contractual or administrative dispute, there was no moral authority to sever him from the grid — a basic requirement of modern life.
I have watched him cycle through multiple generators. Refilling oil at all hours. Replacing alternators. Living with the constant background stress of mechanical failure, noise, fumes, cold starts, and the quiet dread of the lights going out. It is not merely inconvenient. It is degrading. It is a form of slow attrition.
Every route to getting him reconnected — including routes that appear, on paper, to be statutorily available — has failed in practice. Northern Powergrid’s posture, from the outside, begins to look less like public service and more like commercial leverage: apply and pay for a new connection, or remain without supply. And the more one looks into the pattern, the less isolated it appears, as others report similar disputes over disconnection and reconnection charges.
He was repeatedly directed to the “new connection” portal. He insisted that this was not a new connection, but restoration of an existing one unlawfully severed. On paper, each side could articulate a statutory position. In practice, the exchange became adversarial in tone and absolute in posture. That hardened the standoff and made pragmatic resolution progressively less likely.
The result is crushing psychological pressure. Not only from costs warfare, but from the humanitarian reality of being denied basic infrastructure. This is not conduct consistent with a safety-of-life utility.
There is also a difference between losing a case and being branded “Totally Without Merit”, then subjected to a civil restraint order, when the pleaded issue — standing to claim costs, in a case where party status was genuinely arguable — was not fantasy. That label is not merely administrative. It is a reputational and psychological weapon.
At some point the exercise of power becomes unconscionable, even if technically lawful. And the pursuit of these costs, in these circumstances, sits firmly in that category.
To be clear: I understand the ordinary principle. Andrew went to law, and he lost. In the abstract, costs follow events. But something is amiss here. You cannot claim to be committed to ethical corporate governance, as Northern Powergrid does, and conduct yourself in this manner. This is not about serving the citizenry. It is about breaking a citizen.
Electrical power is not meant to be a weapon.
And Andrew being subjected to what feels like a financial execution — for seeking reconnection to the grid, regardless of the merits of the underlying contractual dispute with Octopus — crosses moral boundaries that no civilised society should tolerate.
I previously acted as a McKenzie friend for Andrew — that peculiarly British institution of the quiet, unpaid helper in court who is neither advocate nor professional, but there to steady the hand and take notes. I declined that role this time. I am managing my own trauma from prolonged court exposure. It was painful enough watching from the back of the courtroom.
This is not the end of the world for Andrew. It is, however, the end of a chapter that carries severe consequences. In the ordinary course of enforcement, he may now face a charge against his home, potentially bankruptcy, and the loss of a smallholding that has been in his family for generations. That is tragic — but survivable.
The deeper issue is structural, not personal.
When the coercive machinery of the State intersects with the procedural dominance of well-resourced corporate litigants, ordinary citizens are exposed to overwhelming pressure. The system may operate within its rules, but those rules are navigated very differently by professionals than by individuals.
What is most troubling is that the substantive merits of Andrew’s original disconnection have never truly been adjudicated. The case has collapsed into procedural skirmishing and costs consequences. On that basis, the outcome feels disproportionate — not because the court acted unlawfully, but because the core dispute has effectively been eclipsed by process.
Law is meant to be a forum for adjudication. It should not become a mechanism of exhaustion.
This was not merely a contractual disagreement over billing or technical compliance. It concerns access to electricity — a safety-of-life utility in the modern world. However imperfectly Andrew litigated, this was not a game. It involved heating, refrigeration, lighting, and basic human dignity.
The court’s order is legally defensible. But legality and moral legitimacy are not identical. A corporation entrusted with essential infrastructure carries responsibilities that extend beyond tactical litigation advantage. When enforcement posture risks severe personal harm to a citizen over a dispute that has never been squarely resolved on its merits, something in the moral balance is disturbed.
Absent countervailing forces — regulatory, civic, reputational — large utilities can default to positions that prioritise institutional protection over human welfare. That may be commercially rational. It is not socially healthy.
This should concern us all.