Could Britain survive a blackout?
Blackouts across the Iberian Peninsula have exposed the fragility of our highly-connected infrastructure – and Britain is uniquely ill-equipped for a similar incident, says James Price
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, society comes crashing down because the most talented people are not respected or rewarded for their endeavours, so they go on strike. Quickly, things fall apart. “He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.”
Well, this week we saw the lights of the whole of the Iberian Peninsula go out for a day, and for a moment the curtain was pulled back on the utter fragility of modern society. The cause may not have been the self-removal of Spain and Portugal’s elite, (though that is certainly a trend in Britain and across Western Europe), but the consequences are similar.
In Spain, the socialist prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, hardly inspired confidence, when he admitted: “This has never happened before…and what caused it........
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