Thames Water, in this past year, has reduced leakage only for the first time in four years, and missed its very modest target by 10 megalitres a day - it succeeded in reducing leakage by 30 megalitres a day. United Utilities, in the North West, actually reported increased leakage.Now, I don't underestimate the difficulties and problems facing a company which, like Thames Water, has inherited a Victorian system and decades of public under-management. But the levels of leakage are grotesque, and we should be in no doubt that it is not entirely our individual irresponsibility which has led to the shortage of water.Just as in 1973, we should be alerted by ridiculous and unreasonable demands for change in our personal behaviour to problems with the supplier. We weren't going to clean our teeth in the dark in 1973 even if we could have been persuaded it was our patriotic duty. Now that we're talking about private, money-making companies, no one on earth is going to feel any kind of obligation to leave their urine to fester, just because they can't fix the holes in their pipes More from Philip Hensher. The new but as yet uncrowned powers of Europe met in Paris yesterday.
They are of course Angela Merkel, leader of the German Social Democrats and potentially the next Chancellor come this autumn, and Nicholas Sarkozy, leader of the ruling French UMP party and presumably the 2007 presidential candidate. Both will be hugely important, for, assuming they do indeed both make it to office, the economic future of core Europe will be determined by their actions. For several months, but particularly since the rejection of the European constitution by the French and Dutch voters, there has been a rising feeling that "we can't go on like this". It is analogous to the mood of Britain in the late 1970s, though not nearly as widely spread, for their economic situation is not yet nearly as grave. They just have double-digit unemployment; they don't also have double-digit inflation. The political parallel is the widespread acceptance that the old guard can't fix it. To see Merkel and Sarkozy as Thatchers-in-waiting is far too simple but the long boom of the UK economy since the early 1990s makes too stark a contrast with relative stagnation on the Continent to be ignored.
It may well be that our long boom is drawing towards its end but meanwhile the ability of the UK economy to generate jobs - and hire lots of young French and Germans - is changing perceptions. As Tony Blair told the European parliament in his 23 June speech, Europe has to confront the fact that social Europe had created 20 million unemployed.If Germany has been more heavily smitten by economic stagnation than France, France has experienced another form of humiliation: that little matter of the 2012 Olympics. In the broad scheme of global economics this is a smaller matter but within France there is not just a "bad loser" syndrome.The more thoughtful response has been to ponder what Paris did wrong and London did right. Objectively the Paris bid was better: the stuff is mostly there, whereas London was selling promises. Evidently we are in a world where marketing and public relations seems to be more important than technical competence.That leads to a larger point. The difference between the economies of the UK on the one hand and France and Germany on the other is not the caricature of an Anglo-Saxon free-market one and a regulated continental one. If it were, the appropriate response would be simple in concept if tricky in execution.
