#privatisation

The theme here is the lack of investment, no matter how disastrous the consequences. The main water treatment works in the capital is “on its last legs”, said the chair of the Independent Water Commission, Jon Cunliffe, last summer, while publishing his review for the government of the water industry. Just one major fault at the 60-year-old plant, operated by Thames Water, and “millions of Londoners [would be] without running water”, forcing mass evacuations and the army to go on standby, says the FT. Just how badly the privatised water industry has trashed our waterways is well known. You can’t step in the same river twice, said Heraclitus, but he has been outbid by ecologists who advise that, you know what, you might not want to step in any river in England once. Much less covered is the prospect of parts of the country running out of water entirely, yet government officials and ministers accept it is looming, especially for London and along the east of England. Add some extra responsibility, by all means, to climate breakdown and the sprawl of housing, but 30-plus years of running the water industry for excessive returns has left us badly exposed. Keir Starmer dreams of AI superpower status, while our ever-distracted media offers hot-and-cold running updates on the Beckhams alongside 24/7 Trumpvision. Yet the UK is lurching into a future that, when you stop to think about it, is both more alarming and remarkable: a country famous around the world for its rain imposing on itself a drought.

ID: “THE LONDON ECONOMIC

"Everything is too expensive and nothing works. £200bn of our money has been paid out to shareholders for privatised utilities like rail, mail, energy and busses.

That's money that could have gone into reducing customers' bills or investing in infrastructure. It hasn't, it's gone out in the form of shareholder profit. If you look at social care, which is really the monster under the bed when you look at any local authority's budget, the role of private equity is disgusting. So the first thing we need to do is admit that privatisation has been a failed experiment, it has cost this country dearly and it is an experiment that needs to end."

-ASH SARKAR”.

The big thing to remember about this, and what all of us must keep reiterating when we talk about it, is that the justifications about “efficiency savings” for privatisation were simply blatant lies.