The UK has enough to worry about anyway, without US competition lessons. Its age-old nemesis is one reason: Electricité de France has stepped up its commitment to this market dramatically with its own December deal – the acquisition of London Electricity for £1.39 billion in cash plus the assumption of debt of £530 million, putting a total price tag on London of £1.9 billion ($3.2 billion). This will bring Europe’s largest utility into the heart of the England and Wales market, where today it operates only through the 2000 MWe Interconnector under the English Channel, and related pool sales contracts.
Our own jingoist specialists are already hard at work on this deal. Someone they listen to should pass them a cognac and tell them to relax. London Electricity, though it has tasks of earth-shattering importance like powering this correspondent, is only a sizeable wave in the UK ocean. Electricité de France will not conquer Britain through the capital’s hallowed streets. The long-suffering industrial north will be out of its reach, unless it is willing to tackle competition there too, and if it is, let’s cheer.
But what about state ownership, the lack of reciprocity, the sheer awfulness of selling out to a country that sees the likes of PowerGen as an Anglo-Saxon deformity, a hideous manifestation of small-minded shopkeeper ideology? Come on shopkeepers, Brussels is on your side, not against you. If you have something that will sell in France, from this February, you should have every chance to hawk your wares to the 25 per cent of the French market that counts. If the French authorities instead make trouble, so can you. In the meantime the shop might be in for a much better lighting (and someday gas and heat?) offer from those nice French chaps in London. More cognac?