Last week's power outages in the US of A and Canada have left me pondering- what if it happens here? We have a privatised energy industry and if you compare this to our rail network, we could be in deep trouble. Look at the similarities:
As far as we know, it seems to have been the case that the original faults in the US were exacerbated by what's been described as a "third world power grid" , which had suffered from years of underinvestment.
Over here, after privatisation, the railway infrastructure - surely analogous to a power grid - has suffered years of underinvestment, the costs of correcting which have already been such that, with the work barely started, the company in charge of the tracks - Railtrack - was bankrupted.
Is there a pattern discernable here?