It's snowing men

Today was the heaviest I've seen it snow in England, over all the years I've lived here. Near our place (Woolwich, Southeast London), it must have been about 12cm. It's not a lot actually, but considering it doesn't actually snow much in England, it was a surprise. Needless to say, all transport services came to a standstill. Some people expressed outrage and enquired why it was the case that in America, where despite several feet of snow, things still worked, it always seemed to go belly-up here in England.

I partly share their view - Britain, by most accounts, is a developed nation and claims to be so on several fronts. It's surprising to see then why a single day of heavy rainfall or snow can so completely bring such an industrialised nation to a grounding halt.

But, to be fair, if you don't expect it to snow so much, then you just don't plan for it. I don't work in public service, but given the limited resources Councils have in England, disaster-planning and management is not a top priority, when there are numerous other on-going and 'live' problems that need dealing with. Of course, it should be a priority. But it's a simple resource-allocation problem: you allocate resources to dealing with those issues where results are immediate and problems are solved. Contingency planning cannot be a top priority, when by definition, it does not yield tangible, immediate benefits.

I know this is a myopic view of the world, but what should the Councils do? It's wider issues I think that Britain is faced with, which result in such shoddy service: structural financial constraints, a general lack of accountability, and a nation-wide prevailing sense of 'under-dogism' which gives people the excuse of getting away with poor or average results because nothing better is expected of them in the first place.