Markets gone mad

I have just completed my regular survey from YouGov, a miscellaneous survey which, inter alia and once again, asked me about my experiences with domestic coffee machines. Clearly the YouGov machinery does not extend to remembering that I do not do coffee at home, with a machine or otherwise.

But the point of this post is energy. There was one question which asked which of fifty or so suppliers - most of which I had never heard of - we bought gas from and a similar question about electricity.

Given that there is only one delivery network for gas, only one delivery network for electricity and only a very modest number of companies actually in the business of making gas or electricity (if I can put it like that), having such a large number of companies in the middle strikes me as a bit of a nonsense. All that wasted effort, all those replicated costs arising from maintaining all those separate billing and accounting systems. All those replicated costs of paying all those expensive senior management types in all those companies. Not to mention all the oligarchs, tax havens and fat-cats hiding therein. Bring back public ownership!

I allow that all the electricity being generated in a small way, that is to say otherwise than in large power stations, nuclear or otherwise conventional, confuses the picture a bit. But I don't think it disturbs the aforesaid nonsense.

I also allow that public ownership had its downsides too. But those downsides are better understood now than they were in the bad old days and I am sure that we could do much better now than we did then.