Selling off the family silver
March 29th, 2012
How can you market a monopoly product like water, electricity, gas and the railways? A few short years before his death Harold MacMillan called Thatcher’s behaviour “selling off the family silver.” Had it achieved anything useful there might be something to celebrate. All we have now is a campaign to bring the “big six” to heel for overcharging and less reliable supplies than we had in the 1970s, three day week excepted.
Here’s an account of supply problems from somebody in the business who clearly has a good grasp of what’s gone wrong since the 1970s and how close we have come to power cuts.
First one (in recent years) was 10th December 2002. We were some 2-3 minutes from initiating load shedding (rolling blackouts). I don’t know the cause — most likely a cold spell causing a shortage of gas so that commercial consumers on cheap gas tarrifs have their gas cut off, some of whom were gas fired power stations, so we lose electricity generation capacity at peak heating demand.