Something wrong

It seemed to me yesterday that there was something wrong with the way the Tories had organised our gas industry that Centrica should have a smaller stock market valuation than Sports Direct. That supplying gas (and electricity) to a large chunk of the UK is less important to the chaps in the City than selling fashion shoes.

I suppose the answer is that Centrica might sell gas, but it neither makes the stuff nor moves it around the country. And it is just one supplier among a number.

Still nonsense to my mind that we should have a number of companies all tooled up to sell something which is produced and distributed on a highly centralised basis. A nonsense which would not have been possible at all before the computerisation of retail operations of this sort.

On the other hand, the story at reference 1 makes for complicated reading, so maybe the Tories were right to the extent that the gas world had become too complicated for it to be run as a single integrated, publicly owned business called British Gas. Too complicated for Corbie the Crow to be able to roll the clocks back, should he muddle his way into No.10?

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrica.