In the interests of electrical correctness, ther are one or two things in daves post I must take issue with, because we are all here to learn, everyday is a school day, and safety matters in electrical installations.
Radial circuits were the way power for connected appliances was distributed before the ring main came into being. By the late 60s, when I was serving my apprenticeship, we were rewiring all the old TRS and VIR wired installations, removing radial circuits and replacing then with ring mains. It is also wrong to say that in a radial, each socket is wired seperately back to the consumer unit, each radial is a string of sockets, and uses larger cable than a ring, otherwise you would need a consumer unit with enough ways in it to have a seperate one for each socket, but the radial has one major disadvantage, and that is that in a ring circuit, current is equal in all parts of the ring. In a radial, the first piece of wire between the CU and the first socket carries most current when all sockets on the circuit are in use. This is a major reason why radial circuits were scrapped and replaced with ring circuits, and whilst I know they have been reintroduced, there is no good electrical reason to do this (if you know of one, please let me know!)
I know of no disadvantages of the ring system, and it is generally accepted that the UK wiring system is (or at least, used to be, more later) the safest in the world bar none. Most of the world still does not use shuttered sockets, which were introduced in the UK in 1947.
The point you make about the plug fuses being there to protect the wiring and not the appliance is partly semantic, and electrically incorrect! The fuse or MCB which protects the ring (or radial) is the coarse protection, the fuse in the plug is the fine or selective protection, and although no fuse will protect against electrocution, it is there to isolate the appliance in the event of a fault, thus stopping the risk of a localised fire at the appliance by isolating it from the ring. Take the instance where a double insulated vacuum develops a fault and begins to draw excessive current. There will be no tripping of the RCD, because the current in live and neutral are the same, and let us assume that the fuse in the Vacuums plug is 13A, with a fusing factor of about 1.2 for a cartridge fuse. When the current rises to 15.6 amps, the plug fuse will rupture, and disconnection will occur. Now let us look at the same situation from the point of view of the ring main, it only sees a current flow of 15.6 amps, but if additional load on the ring takes the total load on the ring to more than its protection (fuse or MCB) then the whole ring will be dissconnected, before the cables in the ring even get warm. there is no situation in an otherwise correctly wired installation where the ring will overload to the point of ignition. Also note in the above example a vac should be fused between 5 and 10 amps! I do know however, and have read in publications which should know better, that "the plug fuse is not there to protect the appliance" and semantically, it is not, it is there to prevent temperature rise in the appliance getting to ignition level, it is there for safety, but it does NOT protect the ring main from overload, that is what the fuse or MCB in the consumer unit does.
You could argue that the ring main is even more suited to todays low current applications, but please note that the immersion heater should NEVER be put on a ring main!
Now to my main point, as I mentioned above, fusing factor! I am now retired from the electrical industry, but I have installed many consumer units and distribution boards that use MCB and RCD protection, all done without going too deeply in to the technical side of MCBs. Indeed I have just completed the installation of the 3 phase and single phase distribution boards in my own workshop.In the older Wylex and similar rewirable fuse consumer units the fuse has a "fusing factor" which is given as a figure used to calculate at what current the fuse will actually rupture and isolate the circuit. For rewirable fuses, it was originally set at 1.5, IE a 10A fuse would blow at 15amps, and we did experiments in the college lab to prove this was the case. Since my original training, that figure has been increased to 1.8, and even 2 in some cases, won't go into it here as I am already long winded
but looking at the actuall tripping currents for MCBs, which I had assumed would be much closer to the rated current and thus provide "better" protection I find to my surprise that the following applies.
Type B 3 to 5 times rated current.
Type C 5 to 10 times rated current
Type D 10 to 20 times rated current
Type K 8 to 12 times rated current
Type Z 2 to 3 times rated current
As you can see this means that a rewirable fuse is far safer than an MCB, in that it will isolate a circuit reliably at a lower current, and when you add to this the fact that an MCB DOES NOT FAIL SAFE, you can understand that the new (new new corrected reprint) book of latest regulationd now requires all consumer units to be metal clad and installed in such a manner that an internal fire cannot escape the enclosure. I am really glad to be out of an industry where good engineering has been thrown to the wind, and regulations, which used to be made by senior engineers, are made by wet nosed uni graduates and electrical equipment manufacturers. rant over!