Hard hat, soft head: but Michael Gove must think we’ve gone soft in the head if he thinks we don’t understand that he is privatising profit and nationalising loss in the housebuilding industry.
The decision to lift the cost of mitigating the harmful effects on rivers of housebuilding near them and force it on the public is more proof of a secret Conservative government policy: privatising profit and nationalising loss.
It’s a very simple tactic: if a private business or a privatised utility is in danger of losing profit (not of going out of business, notice) because of statutory rules it must observe, then the government passes the cost of those rules on to the public purse in order to allow shareholders to enjoy profit without responsibility.
It makes a nonsense of the primary reason the Tories gave for electing them into office in the first place, back in 2010. They had claimed that they would reduce the UK’s national debt by cutting spending – but partly because they kept piling the costs incurred by failing privatised utilities onto the Treasury, they have more than doubled that debt.
Taxpayers will pick up the bill for pollution by housebuilders, government officials have admitted, as rules on chemical releases into waterways are scrapped.
The government has said it will double Natural England’s wetland funding to £280m in order to show it is trying to meet the requirements of its legally binding Environment Act.
This extra £140m will come from the public purse, the government confirmed. When asked by the Guardian whether this meant the taxpayer was now picking up the bill for pollution caused by developers, a government official responded “yes”
It is Tory policy. They make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. And they are doing it by forcing the hardworking many to shoulder the responsibilities that should be borne by the idle few.
That is, privatising profit and nationalising loss.
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A reminder: Thames Water wants Keir Starmer and his Labour Party to support their decision to put money into shareholder dividends rather than into stopping them from pumping millions of tonnes of faeces and other sewage into our once-clean rivers and coasts. He probably will support them because he’s a right-winger who supports profit for the few over the well-being of the many.
Were you shocked to learn that a privatised water firm that is in deep financial trouble has approached the Labour Party to help it avoid being re-nationalised?
Liv Garfield, the boss of water giant Severn Trent, is trying to bring a taskforce of utility bosses together with the Labour party in a bid to head off the threat of nationalisation.
In an email sent to other utility CEOs which she describes as “sensitive” and “highly confidential”, the £4 million a year Garfield [writes] “One idea we believe might be attractive to the Labour leadership is re-purposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of declared social purpose companies – companies that remain privately owned, who absolutely can (and should) make a profit, but ones that also have a special duty to take a long-term view.”
Garfield, one of a handful of female bosses of FTSE 100 companies, warns her colleagues: “The Labour leadership is aware we are soft testing various ideas but have asked us to keep it highly confidential so please don’t forward this email.”
The email seems to include comments from a Labour representative in support of Ms Garfield’s ideas.
In other words:
Labour has been caught plotting with a water giant CEO in a bid to stop nationalisation.
This comes as private companies spew out sewage in our waterways and tell us to foot the bill. Shameful.
Labour is in the pocket of big bosses and will never nationalise water.
We will 💧
— Breakthrough Party 🟠🌤️ (@BThroughParty) June 30, 2023
Putting aside the Breakthrough Party’s electioneering, we can see that the sentiment about Labour is correct. If you want further proof, consider the following “before/after” video clip showing Keir Starmer lying about nationalisation, not once but twice:
Keir Starmer running to be Labour leader: I will nationalise water
Let’s pause for a moment to remind ourselves of why the privatised water firms are facing possible renationalisation. First, the pollution:
This river belongs to everybody!@thameswater should be extracting poo and leaving the profit, not pumping in poo and extracting profit!
If enough people are cheesed off about this, then I think that people will demand that ownership of @thameswater is returned first to the… pic.twitter.com/qq3odMOeua
In a little over three decades, Thames Water, the biggest water and sewerage company in England, serving 15 million people, has transformed from a debt-free public utility into what critics argue is a privately owned investment vehicle carrying the highest debt in the industry.
Over those years … its executives and the shareholders and private equity companies who own it have presided over decades of underinvestment, aggressive cost-cutting and huge dividend payments.
The symptom of these decades can be seen in the scale of sewage discharges, the record leaks from its pipes and the state of its treatment plants – which are now at the centre of a criminal investigation by the Environment Agency into illegal sewage dumping and a regulatory inquiry by Ofwat.
Privatisation – which was intended to lead to a new era of investment, improved water quality and low bills – turned water into a cash cow for investment firms and private equity companies.
Charts accompanying the article show how Thames Water has built up £14.3bn of debt, while at the same time handing out dividends totalling £7.2bn. One owner, Australian “infrastructure asset management firm” Macquarie, took out £656m in dividends in 2007, when profits were a fraction of that at £241m.
How could it produce any statement of profit at all? Easy: borrowing. Money for equipment and day-to-day running was borrowed while the cash paid in bills went into shareholder bank accounts (as described by economise Richard Murphy here).
It is this situation that Labour is being asked to support – and which, from the tone of Ms Garfield’s email, it does.
Should we be shocked? No. We should not even be surprised. Labour is not the socialist, “for the many, not the few” endeavour it was intended to be when it was founded. In just three short years, Keir Starmer (the serial liar – as demonstrated above – who is currently in charge of that party) has perverted it into the opposite of what it was.
Where Labour would once have been expected to suspend anybody suspected of sexualising children while police investigate, Starmer’s party puts them up for election:
(Odd, that. When This Writer stood for a council election, my Labour membership was suspended within days of the poll, after the party accepted entirely false claims that I was an anti-Semite. Clearly, the party currently runs a “one rule for us, another rule for you” system.)
Labour under Starmer is not opposed to racism. In fact, some say its MPs and leaders are themselves avid racists. Consider the claim against Jess Phillips, below – who apparently whipped up a dogpile on Twitter against the head teacher of a school that isn’t even in her constituency:
— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) July 1, 2023
And Starmer’s Labour, while still claiming to be a “broad church” that accepts a wide range of political views, is actually becoming more narrow-mindedly right-wing all the time by purging its membership of anybody whose political views are to the left of – well, Mussolini, it seems.
After years of focusing on more overtly left-wing members, Starmer’s leadership has started on what are deemed to be “soft left” figures – causing a stir yesterday (Saturday, July 1, 2023) when Neal Lawson of the think tank Compass was targeted for removal. He wrote about it in The Guardian:
They wrote coldly to tell me that back in May 2021, I’d committed a crime: retweeting a Lib Dem MP’s call for some voters to back Green candidates in local elections, accompanied by my suggestion that such cross-party cooperation represented “grownup progressive politics”.
Why did I say that, why on earth am I facing expulsion for it, and what might it mean for the future of our politics? I said it for two reasons. First, because the progressive majority in our country is thwarted by the electoral system. Votes on the right go almost exclusively to the Tories, but the progressive vote is always split between Labour, Lib Dems and Greens. Under first past the post (FPTP) the Conservatives win on a minority of the vote, again and again. Cooperation between progressives just makes sense.
Governing with others is better than losing alone… So, why use an uncontentious tweet from over two years ago to move to expel me?
The reason is that the party machine is no longer run in this long and rich spirit of pluralism. It has been captured by a clique who see only true believers or sworn enemies.
In fact, Labour has a standing rule that no party member may voice support for another party. Members on the left have been expelled for that since before Mr Lawson made his tweet. And This Writer has little sympathy because the fact that he did publish such a tweet suggests he may have thought he was one of the privileged clique at the top who are above the rules.
In any case, Mr Lawson doesn’t need (and probably wouldn’t want) my support to deal with this. He’ll have enough support from others – reluctant though it may be in some cases:
Obviously I'm going to stand up for any of the soft left who are now being purged by the Labour Party. But it'd be a whole lot easier if they'd stood up for Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and the rest of us when we were being purged. And if they had, maybe they'd be safe now.
“First they came for the socialists…” as Martin Niemoller wrote about the Nazis.
Well, now they have come for Neal Lawson, and he’s lucky that the socialists are still around to speak out for him, even though the party leaders he has supported until now may wish the situation to be otherwise.
And this is the reason the privatised water companies who have vandalised our rivers and coasts are turning to Keir Starmer for help: they see in him a kindred spirit – a fellow vandal.
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Clean water: enjoy the photograph. Soon the only clean water you’ll see will be in images like this – unless YOU put a stop to the raw sewage scandal.
Ash Sarkar does it again.
Appearing as a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time, she was asked to discuss the way privatised water companies have been allowed to dump raw sewage into the UK’s waterways, poisoning them – and have even gone beyond the permissible limit, incurring large fines.
The fact that the water firms then pay these fines make a very clear point – that it makes more financial sense to pay up and carry on polluting than it does to clean up their act.
Ms Sarkar put forward the obvious solution, and – well, you’ll see what happened, but “Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush” gives the game away a bit:
The right created the problem.
The left has the solution.
Centrists say the solution is "too expensive" so we just have to put up with the problem.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) May 12, 2023
She phrased that brilliantly, I thought.
And she passed responsibility on to Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, to explain why her party is not offering re-nationalisation of the water companies as an alternative to the current Tory mismanagement that is stinking up the entire country.
Here’s what she said:
Labours Thangam Debbonaire says the next Labour govt won't take our failed privatised water industry into public ownership because of the cost. Why not issue bonds?
But then of course, cost is simply an excuse to mask the Labour rights ideological oposition to public ownership. pic.twitter.com/7eZq0HP4E7
So, filling potholes in our roads is more important than cleaning up our environment and ensuring our natural water is free of diseases like the e.Coli that is infesting the river near Environment Secretary Therese Coffey’s own home?
No wonder Phil Waller tweeted what he did:
Labour are frankly shit
"we can't nationalise because of the cost"
meanwhile, many want services nationalised Because they're getting poorer, the services are shit or spewing out shite & making large profits
And while the politicians dither over technicalities (there’s plenty of money to pay for re-nationalisation; the problem is simply that the Westminster elite don’t want to stop the flow of profit), the rest of us continue to drown in our own waste – and theirs:
— Robert Bob…. What is this nightmare? (@MrRobertBob1) May 11, 2023
"Sewage flooding Cambs street for third day 'going straight into the river'."
Meet @Anglianwater the same AW that just 2 weeks ago was fined £2.6 for illegally dumping sewage, the 5th such fine in 2 years. £4.328m in fines in the 2 years alone. That AW?https://t.co/AxWPT01R8a
The answer is clear: if privatised water firms are refusing to clean up their act (and they are) then the owners need to be deprived of their profit stream by re-nationalisation. And if our current Westminster politicians like Thangam Debbonaire, Labour, and all the Tories won’t do it, then we must get them out of Parliament – for our own survival.
Jeremy Corbyn: his Project for Peace and Justice has just announced its five demands for government (of any stripe) to deal with the cost of living crisis and bring real prosperity to everyone.
After Jeremy Hunt announced his “E’s and Wizz” Budget and Keir Starmer brought out his “five missions”, here’s a message from the Project for Peace and Justice, brought to you by Jeremy Corbyn:
Last week, the Chancellor announced a budget that did nothing to alleviate the obscene levels of poverty and inequality in our society – instead protecting the riches of global corporations and the wealthiest in our society.
He should have used the opportunity to present policies to deal with the cost of living crisis with a budget that could have made a difference to the lives of all those that have suffered under 13 years of austerity, the Covid-19 pandemic and a decline in real wages.
That’s why we need an alternative budget that puts people first, based on the following five demands:
A REAL PAY RISE FOR ALL
Everyone has a right to live and work with dignity. That means giving nurses, teachers and public sector workers an above-inflation pay rise, implementing a minimum wage of £15 per hour, banning zero-hours contracts and reversing cruel benefit sanctions.
DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
As millions struggle to pay their energy bills, fossil fuel giants are taking home record profits. Private profiteering is ripping people off and destroying our planet. Alongside water, rail and mail, it’s time we put energy back where it belongs: in public hands.
Democratic public ownership will empower communities, bring prices down and kickstart a Green New Deal that invests in clean energy.
HOUSING FOR THE MANY
Housing is a human right, not a commodity – everyone deserves a decent, safe, warm and affordable place to live.
We need an immediate rent freeze and reduction, an end to no-fault evictions and an urgent mass council home building programme.
TAX THE RICH TO SAVE THE NHS
After years of austerity and privatisation, our NHS is on its knees. It’s time to end outsourcing, invest in a fully public system of universal healthcare and build a National Care Service.
The government says there’s no more money for our NHS – but they’re wrong. We can give our public services the money they need by introducing a wealth tax, raising income tax on the top five per cent of earners and making corporations pay their fair share.
WELCOME REFUGEES AND A WORLD FREE FROM WAR
Refugees are being scapegoated for an economic crisis they didn’t create. We must work towards a world of peace, free from nuclear weapons where conflicts are resolved through diplomacy and negotiation. We need a humane migration system based on dignity, compassion and care, which gives asylum seekers the right to work, healthcare and housing.
The refugees of today are our doctors, teachers and neighbours of tomorrow.
As we face the starkest cost-of-living crisis in a generation, we cannot afford to be timid. We need to offer a clearer alternative to the Tories’ failed economic experiment. As striking workers in Trafalgar Square demonstrated, there is an appetite for something different.
The manifesto [Labour] put forward in 2017 and 2019 gave hope to millions around the country – and now we must continue to build [a] radical alternative vision for our country. You can find out more about these demands in my article in the Morning Star.
We must unite, organise and build our vision for a fairer world. I hope you will join me in demanding and campaigning for these policies, and sign up to support them here.
Fair enough?
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A publicly owned electricity generation firm could save Britons nearly £21bn a year, according to new analysis that bolsters Labour’s case to launch a national energy company if the party gains power.
Thinktank Common Wealth has calculated that the cost of generating electricity to power homes and businesses could be reduced by £20.8bn or £252 per household a year under state ownership, according to a report seen by the Guardian.
It’s interesting that a state-owned company would save homes money; when electricity was privatised under Margaret Thatcher, we were told our bills would be lower.
So it seems the Thatcher government lied to us.
And that leads me to my second point: if privatisation has led to higher bills, then why not just nationalise the privatised energy firms?
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The problem: energy prices are set to have quadrupled within a year and the Tory government is doing nothing about it.
Controversial as he may be in many respects, Owen Jones makes a lot of good points in this short clip from an appearance on Jeremy Vine’s show.
Firstly, because the energy firms are private companies, their shareholders have received £200 billion in dividends since 2010 – money that could have been used to reduce bills instead, or to free the UK from dependence on fossil fuels provided by foreign suppliers (this would have eliminated the price shock that has sent our bills skyrocketing today).
We’ve been told profits have increased fourfold because of the price increases – and very little of that is likely to go into energy independence; 60 per cent of these new profits will go to shareholders.
The energy industry is a natural monopoly which should never have been privatised. The solution to the price problem is to re-nationalise the industry and impose stern pricing controls on bills sent to the public. Windfall taxes on the companies are not enough.
See/hear for yourself:
Sadly, nobody in any position to affect the energy crisis is even thinking of re-nationalisation, despite the example of France, where price increases are pinned at an affordable four per cent.
Even Labour leader Keir Starmer thinks the energy firms should remain in the hands of billionaires – a position that sets him against the vast majority of his party’s members.
But then, who cares about that? Starmer’s party “reforms” have ensured that the opinions of Labour members won’t have any impact on party policy in the future. The membership exists to service the desires of the party’s elite MPs, candidates and other high-level representatives.
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Power and pollution: Ed Miliband wants government to take over failing energy firms, restore them to health at huge cost to the public purse, and then sell them back so the 1% can rip us all off again. Why should we, when they have done so little (for example) to tackle climate change?
Read Natalie’s response to Ed Miliband’s industrial-disaster interview with Andrew Marr, then watch the clip. Then read her response again.
She’s right, isn’t she?
You're utterly useless @Ed_Miliband seriously? Renationalise to use taxpayer's money to sort this mess out again & then put it back out to corporations to milk us again! Ur nothing more than an instrument of the 1%! Labour like the Tories need to burn! (Figuratively Twitter!) https://t.co/MTcMgt8FG5
Miliband was saying that Labour would take struggling private energy companies back into public ownership – that’s nationalisation, for those of you who are too young to remember when we had industries owned by the government. That’s fine.
He was saying Labour would then use public money – your money – to restore those concerns and improve them. That’s fine too.
And then he ruined it by saying Labour would then re-privatise them so profit-grubbing shareholders could once again suck out all the cash they could while failing to invest in the system or the service, knowing they can always rely on the government to bail them out in the future.
That is no way to run a country.
Energy privatisation has failed.
The owners of the privatised companies – one-third of whom are foreign governments – are charging us the Earth (literally, when you consider the climate change implications) for very little, and when they get into trouble they are handing the mess back to us to sort out.
That is not good business and there is no way any self-respecting government – of any colour – would accept it.
There’s certainly no reason any voter should put up with it.
Miliband has hammered another nail into the coffin of StarmerLabour’s election hopes.
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Johnson and Starmer: the so-called Labour leader has shown that his policy is even more right-wing than the Tory. As for pragmatism, it is Johnson who is being pragmatic by renationalising firms when he has to, rather than following an ideological blind alley in the vain hope of pleasing business bosses.
Stunning:
BREAKING: Boris Johnson has just introduced state intervention into the energy market to ensure fuel supplies, making him more left wing than Sir Keir Starmer
It’s true – Boris Johnson is either actively nationalising or preparing to nationalise energy firms, to stop them collapsing due to surging gas prices. Here‘s The Independent:
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is holding crisis talks with firms following a meeting with regulator Ofgem… Mr Kwarteng said “well-rehearsed plans” were in place to ensure consumers were not cut off.
And he indicated that he would be prepared to appoint a “special administrator” that would see the firms taken under the government’s wing – effectively nationalising them on a temporary basis.
But at the Labour Party Conference, Keir Starmer’s shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, insisted that “this is not the moment to be looking at nationalising companies”.
This is utterly bizarre.
This is not the moment to be looking at nationalisation as energy companies go bust and bill skyrocket.
This is precisely the moment to consider nationalising companies!
Reeves made herself and her boss sound like idiots – which, of course, they are.
Their protestations – her yesterday (September 27), him on Sunday (September 26) – weren’t pragmatic, no matter how often they tried to shoehorn that word into their comments.
They were ideological – exactly what Reeves and Starmer were trying to deny.
But it’s a stupid ideology.
Starmer’s entire policy is: butter up the business bosses. He is convinced that if he sucks up to the fat cats, they’ll support him into government after the next election. He is wrong for a very obvious reason.
Business leaders really are pragmatic. They can see that Brexit has created serious issues for the energy firms, for fuel supply and in other areas due to knock-on effects, and they acknowledge that their firms would be better-off under government control for the duration of the problem.
In other words: by lurching leftwards towards privatisation, Boris Johnson has done the right thing.
And where does this leave Starmer (and Reeves)?
Absolutely nowhere. Not only are they out of touch with party members; they are out of touch with the entire United Kingdom.
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Keir Starmer: his own entitled arrogance led to this defeat.
More-Tory-than-Tories Labour leader Keir Starmer stood humiliated after his party conference rejected his refusal to re-nationalise energy firms.
Labour is now mandated to bring all the privatised franchises back into public ownership, in line with the wishes of the general public – and Starmer will just have to lump it.
Nationally, 53 per cent of the public want energy firms re-nationalised while only 15 per cent oppose the move.
But let us be clear that this is not just a backlash from the ‘Labour Left’; it is a decision by a majority of delegates from all sides of the party’s so-called ‘broad church’.
It is also a hilarious turnabout – and loss of face – for the Labour leader who was exposed as a liar only hours earlier, when he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that he did not believe in nationalisation, contradicting his own pledge to party members when he was seeking election as leader.
Labour delegates on the conference floor voted overwhelming in favour of a “socialist green new deal” motion – explicitly backing public ownership of energy companies. The motion also called for the creation of millions of green jobs and publicly-owned green investment banks.
Perhaps Starmer should have showed less entitled ignorance to a Green New Deal activist he brushed off on his way to the party conference, earlier:
Young people were ignored by @Keir_Starmer when we asked him where he stood on the #GreenNewDeal in Brighton today.
£85 billion is the minimum we would need to create millions of good green jobs.
It’s a performance that takes arrogance to a shocking level. This Writer would defy any Labour supporter not to be angry after watching it.
And that is Starmer’s problem: more and more Labour members are getting angry at his treatment of the rank-and-file, grassroots party as though they exist merely to serve him and his elite chums.
This vote is a wake-up call, and the message is clear.
It says: “No. You do what we tell you.”
Sadly, I don’t think he has the brains to recognise it.
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The Confederation of British Industry has started its usual pre-election campaign against the Labour Party – with the usual nonsense claims about Labour nationalisation policies.
It seems we are being asked to believe that bringing national utilities, the railways and the Royal Mail back into public ownership will cost the Treasury £196 billion, with no concurrent benefits to the economy.
I have to agree with Labour on this; it is nothing but scaremongering – and not very clever scaremongering, at that.
For a start, most of the utilities and railway firms Labour wants to take back into public ownership are currently owned by foreign firms – many of them owned by foreign governments.
That’s a lot of UK citizens’ money going abroad, right there. Bringing those firms back into public ownership would bring huge amounts of money back into the UK economy, instead of subsidising services in other lands.
We have been led to believe that Vince Cable sold our Royal Mail to hedge funds. Who knows where they’re putting the profits? That cash certainly doesn’t seem to be going back into the business. A tax haven, perhaps?
If so, then bringing the Royal Mail back into public ownership not only safeguards our postal service but brings huge amounts of money back into the UK economy.
That’s just off the top of my head.
The CBI admits its analysis is flawed, in that it only concentrates on the costs of any renationalisation, and explicitly does not consider any benefits.
The claims of this organisation have no value at all.
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