Broken Britain

I was asked to obtain a copy of the Sunday Times recently. On the front page of Business and Finance section there was article by Jamie Nimmo about an electricity supplier who had to take over customers from collapsed suppliers and was allowed to pass on £280 million in costs to customers. The whole process seems incredibly obscure and hard to understand, but the net result is users paying more for electricity, as far as I can tell for no other reason than that the privatised electricity market is a disaster.

Intuitively, monopolistic vital services like electricity, should be owned by the public that uses the service, and it should be under their democratic control. To make this happen would mean re-nationalising some or all of the electricity system. As far as I know, only the Green Party clearly states that it would renationalise electricity (and a lot of other vital services, too). The Greens have only one MP, but does have 547 councillors across England and Wales. Some commentators like Sunny Hundal say that technology has moved on and that time for nationalisation has passed.