I may never understand why in England we changed our power cable colours to the european ones.
It changed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well. The UK colour scheme for 240 V flexible cords, namely live: brown, neutral: blue, earth: green (green/yellow since 2006) is not specifically "European", it's also used in Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia etc as well as the EU and is based on the international standard IEC 60446. It changed in Britain more than 40 years ago, so any equipment still using the old (red=live, black=neutral, green=earth) scheme must belong in a museum and may be unsafe because insulation that old may well have deteriorated. One reason for the change had to do with the danger posed if someone who was red/green colour blind wired up a plug. The earth (safety) conductor which connects to any exposed, touchable metal in an appliance is intended to serve as protection if a live conductor somehow contacts the metalwork. In that situation there would be a short and a fuse would blow or a breaker would trip. If the earth and live conductors were swapped in the plug, the exposed metalwork would immediately become live when the appliance was plugged in. The fuse would not blow, and there would be no sign that anything was wrong, and the applicance would probably still work. This would, of course be very dangerous. Of course nowadays we have RLCBs and moulded on plugs on many appliances. These, and the wiring colour change, are two reasons why there are fewer domestic electrocutions than decades ago.