Clean water: but in United Utilities’ catchment area, the money seems to be as dirty as Lake Windermere.
This should be self-explanatory.
But does the payout make any sense to anybody at all?
So less than 24 hours after discovering @unitedutilities spent up to 70 days illegally dumping sewage into lake Windermere the company announces it is paying shareholders a dividend bigger than the company profits
Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
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.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Rivers of Shit: isn’t it time we admitted to ourselves that it is government policy to let privatised water company shareholders pump untreated sewage into our rivers and seas and take the money saved from not treating it – along with money that should have been used to modernise the water and sewage infrastructure – as profit, while blinding the regulators that are supposed to monitor and penalise these transgressions so that we cannot know the extent of the harm?
This Site has been quiet about the ongoing crisis of the UK’s waterways being polluted with thousands of tonnes of untreated sewage lately. The reason is simply that individual stories – snapshots – don’t give you a chance to appreciate the full horror of what is happening.
The following video clip might help, though.
In it, Professor Jamie Woodward points out that not only has the government allowed privatised water firms to dump all that toxic waste into the local ecosystem, but it has slashed the budget of the regulator that is supposed to monitor any such pollution, down to one-third of what it used to be – and some may say that this wasn’t enough in the first place:
Prof Jamie Woodward(Manchester University) – "Any other industry that dumps toxic waste in the environment, the CEOs would go to prison… it's still an incredibly profitable activity to dump untreated sewage in rivers… we need to implement fines…"#BBCBreakfastpic.twitter.com/60EMeRMTZ3
With only limited means of monitoring pollution by water companies, the regulator has no way of knowing the level of harm being done. This could then be flung in all our faces by the government if we try to complain that we’re being pelted with you-know-what so that these firms can make a profit. It could be used as an excuse to do nothing.
In fact, the following suggests that it is currently being used as such an excuse:
Want to have your local river designated as bathing water?
Not unless there is at least 100 swimmers a day using that bit of river and toilets within 500 metres (1,640ft) you won't.
For those of you heading west over the next few weeks.
"Cornwall sea and rivers are most polluted by sewage in the UK. Sewage was pumped into Cornwall's waters for nearly 80,000 hours last year."https://t.co/PqjRM5NO7b
One water company – Thames Water – seemed to be facing re-nationalisation because its business plan was not only harmful to the environment but had brought it to the brink of bankruptcy…
Why hasn't Thames Water been taken into democratic public ownership yet?
Then we discovered that the firm is planning to increase its bills, to save itself from collapse. There is not even the slightest hint that any of that money will be used to purify the water it pumps into our rivers.
Thames Water boss says it’s an “unfortunate truth” that bills will have to rise to save the company from collapse.
I’ve got a different unfortunate truth: privatisation has been a complete and utter failure.
Enough is enough — put water back into public hands!
After all of last week's shenanigans I wonder if @thameswater's acting CEO Cathryn (I will not apologise) Ross will withdraw her comments about putting up customers' bills to compensate for her failures as the regulator and TW's corporate greed?https://t.co/eZmkw8XY2H
And what use is purified water when the pipes through which it runs are made of lead – and are therefore toxic – because the water companies haven’t replaced the infrastructure, as they were expected to?
"Exclusive: UK water companies have failed to replace three million toxic lead pipes."
The infrastructure is also leaking around 1.1 TRILLION litres of water out of the system every year, according to Ofwat. Then the water companies tell us we have to have hosepipe bans. They are telling us to go without the service we deserve so they can have the profit they don’t.
Typical water industry nonsense.
There is only one reason we have hosepipe bans, instead of spending our money on infrastructure they paid out billions to shareholders . That’s it. That’s all you need to know. https://t.co/0FH2eLbLqo
Cathryn Ross co-CEO of Thames Water says don't flush your loo unless it's brown
But she has six toilets, a 32ft pool, a hot tub and a loft sauna at her five-bedroom £1.7 million home, set in nearly an acre of land. pic.twitter.com/b7ajiM1VK5
— Louis 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 〓〓 💙 Defend the right to vote (@LouisHenwood) July 16, 2023
Piling even more insult on top of all this injury, one of the worst-performing water companies was named company of the year at the Water Industry Awards, 2023:
"Anglian Water named one of worst performing water companies by Environment Agency."
That of course came just 3 days after @AnglianWater was named company of the year at the Water Industry Awards 2023. What a farce.https://t.co/lPORmACAb8
Remember that you have a human right to water, meaning that if one of the privatised companies fails, the state has to pick up the bill to put it right via renationalisation.
So, far from being the salvation of this vital national utility – as it has been described recently by ministers pointing out that investment in water was a very low priority when it was privatised – the sale of water to private shareholders has destroyed our system while the people causing the damage have extracted huge fortunes from it.
And the government that should have been safeguarding the interests of customers who are forced to rely on these large monopoly businesses has deliberately blinded the watchdog organisations.
That is enemy action. Your government – and the water firms – are your enemies; they are charging you a fortune to let them poison you.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
The Bank of England: it raised interest rates, supposedly to combat inflation – and now the banks have made a fortune in profits and inflation hasn’t fallen significantly.
After the energy firms, the banks.
Interesting how it goes, isn’t it?
The energy firms put up their prices for no very good reason (remember: the actual cost of gas and electricity is much, much lower than the amount you’re paying for it. The corporations say they keep the price up to smooth out any sudden shocks as the price comes down but they never refund the extra amount that you pay after the final costs are known).
This causes inflation.
The Bank of England then acts to reduce inflation – by increasing interest rates.
This creates a huge profit for the banks.
This profit is also never refunded.
Inflation has remained high.
Cue outrage:
Another day of massive profits for the banks.
HSBC profits DOUBLED as interest rates soared.
Banks – just like the energy firms – are lining their pockets at your expense.
Let's hit them with a Windfall Tax and use the money to bail out the people – as we once did the banks!
SSE, Shell – they’re energy companies; Barclays is a bank…
That’ll be a “no”, then.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
After British Gas posted huge profits, made possible by price-gouging – charging you far too much for the service it provides – Rishi Sunak has appeared on TV to tell you that he’s tackling all the inflation that has been caused by your pay rises.
… Except, of course, that tackling that kind of inflation doesn’t involve any work at all because your pay rises haven’t caused any of the inflation that has been inflicted on us by boneheadedly stupid, economically-illiterate, back-of-a-cigarette-packet policies dreamed up by Sunak and his equally stupid forerunners.
Sunak’s broadcast was an attempt to distract your attention away from the real cause of inflation – the high prices charged by corporate bandits for no reason at all – and to dupe you into thinking that your pay demands are responsible.
You are not responsible for any inflation at all. Sunak and the corporations to whom he whores himself are.
Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain further:
The Prime Minister just posted a shameless video doubling down on his rubbished claim anything more than crappy real terms pay cuts for public sector workers will fuel high inflation – it’s ABSOLUTE BOLL**** & he knows it!
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Bills, bills, bills: British Gas has made nearly £1bn in profits in the last six months because it is price-gouging its customers – charging them much more than they should be paying. Many of those customers are so stupid, they can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
The most eye-watering part of the energy firms’ announcement of eye-watering profits is the fact that so many people in the UK are so keen to say they are powerless to do anything about it.
Tell them that they’re being ripped off because of political decisions by their government and these absolute morons say that, well, they’re not interested in politics because it has nothing to do with them.
They’ve literally just been told that politics is what’s leeching away their ability to feed, clothe and house themselves and their response is that it’s nothing to do with them!
Perhaps it’s time to admit that people like the Tories and the energy firm bosses, who make the decisions to take all the cash away from us, are not the problem.
The problem is the people who prop them up – either by voting for the Tories like mindless drones or by refusing to vote for anyone who will make a difference.
That includes all the “tactical” idiots who would rather replace the Conservatives with a party that has identical policies because “we’ve got to get the Tories out” than even consider supporting anybody with a plan that will actually, you know, help.
It also includes everybody who insists that we should support Keir Starmer’s party, which has surely become the most untrustworthy organisation in the UK. It is currently promising to levy a windfall tax on energy firms’ profits, but the evidence of the recent past tells us that this will not happen if that party – which used to represent Labour – takes office again under its current leadership.
So we get this:
British Gas has just posted an 888% increase in profits for 2023 compared to the first 6 months of 2022.
But of course he has been kicked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for having ideas that are far too sensible to ever be considered by Starmer and his Blue Labour layabouts.
The only answer that will break the deadlock is to support alternative parties and independent candidates who actually have policies that will bring wealth back to the majority of the people, rather than siphon it off into the hands of people who already have too much.
Ah, but then we run into all those idiots who think Starmer’s identikit Tory policies are an alternative, the morons who reckon tactical voting in favour of whichever party came second last time will get the Tories out next time, and the lunatics who will still believe none of this affects them while their house is being repossessed.
These are the reason the UK is in such a hopeless position. What are you doing about it?
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
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.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
This is now proved true: in a bid to save privatised water firms’ profits, the Tory government is asking them to spend less money on cleaning our water than is needed to do the job. You will drink dirty water; it will make you sick.
Earlier today, This Site reported that Thames Water – the privatised water firm that is in danger of collapse – has not paid any dividends to shareholders in six years.
That was the best information available to This Writer at the time.
However, new information has come to light:
Left: Rebecca Pow, "Thames Water has not paid any dividends for the last six years."
Right: Thames Water paid £37 million dividends in 2022, and £33 million dividends in 2021. pic.twitter.com/Wiieg7WJWQ
Economist Richard Murphy has examined the finances of all the privatised water companies, and has come back with several conclusions:
Their operating profit margin is a staggeringly-high 35 per cent. From this, we may conclude that there is no reason for Thames Water to be in danger of insolvency.
Every single penny they have made in profit has been paid out to shareholders in dividends. None was reinvested in infrastructure or equipment (borrowing paid for equipment and the infrastructure was ignored). So Tories like those on the BBC’s Politics Live on June 28 were wrong when they said money has been invested in improving infrastructure. We can’t say they were lying because they may have been misinformed, but someone definitely lied to them.
Mr Murphy’s conclusion on this is stark: “The public is being fleeced by these companies who are simply treating the fact that the English consumer has had no choice as to who to buy water from as a means to extract profit from them.”
But that’s not all!
The industry has made investments – £77bn on equipment, the rest on other financial investments. This has been funded mostly by borrowing, with £13bn coming from shareholders. This means the claim (when water was privatised) that private capital would fund water after privatisation was nonsense gibberish; it is being funded by borrowing.
Mr Murphy’s figures show £13bn invested by shareholders, who have received £25bn in dividends, meaning that for every pound they have put into the industry, they have received nearly two pounds in return.
Finally:
It is clear that the water companies are environmentally insolvent. This means their business structures are not sustainable in terms of reducing pollution and if they are made to put in the necessary money to do so, they will go bankrupt.
What this means, of course is that the water firms have been polluting the UK’s waterways to a staggering extent. I’ll republish the part of Mr Murphy’s thread that covers this, so you have it straight from the horse’s mouth:
That pollution cannot persist. Unless it is stopped we will end up without reliable clean water in England. The estimated costs of ending this pollution do, however, vary considerably.
The House of Lords looked at this issue based on independent analysis and concluded that the most likely estimate of the cost of getting rid of all the pollution in our water was £260 billion. And that needs to be done as soon as possible. I suggest ten years.
What the industry is offering is something quite different. Even if they meet the government’s demand of them, at best I estimate that based on officially published data they might cut the crap in water by two-thirds, at best, by 2050.
Let me put that another way. The government thinks that saving the private water companies is more important than them polluting our water, rivers and beaches with all the costs that will create.
In simple language: because they decided to take their massively-overinflated profits for themselves rather than invest them in improving the sewage system, the water companies and their shareholders have created a problem that will cost £260 billion to solve – and if they are made to shell out that money now, they will all go out of business.
The government is therefore asking them to pay slightly more than one-fifth of that amount – but as a result, your water supply will be polluted by the sewage and other rubbish that the water companies have pumped into the ecosystem.
This means the Conservative government – and you need to bear it in mind if you have a Tory MP – has said that it is happy for you to be made ill by polluted or infected water, in order to allow privatised water firms to continue making a profit.
The answer to all this, of course, is re-nationalisation.
Ah, but the government says this is too expensive, because of the cost of buying out the shareholders!
Is it, though?
Mr Murphy says no compensation should be offered to shareholders at all, because they have behaved in an irresponsible way that means it will cost more money to fix the problems they have created than they originally paid to own their parts of these firms.
He adds that providers of loans to the water firms may have to take a hit as well, because they made bad decisions in lending to these companies.
The Tories in government are unlikely to accept this because, even though it is in line with a basic principle of business that if you invest in something unprofitable, you lose money, it diverges from their strategy in privatising water in the first place: that the profits would go to private shareholders and it is the losses that will be paid for by the public and customers.
Mr Murphy makes another excellent suggestion – which is that, because the water industry will need to be supported with borrowed funds, it should issue water bonds to the public via ISAs. You could save in a way that ensures we get clean water in the future.
I appreciate that this is a lot of information but it is very important information that could affect your health, and that of your family and children in the future.
So please share this article to ensure the information in it is seen by as many people as possible.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
You pay for their bad decisions: the privatised, profit-driven water firms have had more than 30 years to fund the restoration of the UK’s crumbling sewage system but instead they have given £72 billion to investors and pumped our effluent into the environment. Now they want to increase our bills by almost half to fix the problem they have created. But where will the money really go?
It looks like the UK’s privatised water firms are trying to sell us down the river again.
They want to add an extra 40 per cent to our bills, saying that’s what it will cost to clean up the sewage crisis they have caused by neglecting the UK’s crumbling system of sewage pipes.
Here’s a report about it, broadcast early in the morning of Wednesday, June 28, 2023:
Water companies are drawing up plans to increase bills by up to 40% to pay for the cost of tackling the sewage crisis.
According to The Times, rises are expected to be announced next year and could mean annual bills increase from an average of around £450, up to £680. pic.twitter.com/rUKXaNX54i
It’s true that Thames Water boss Sarah Bentley has quit her job, that was worth £1.6 million a year to her, even before she got anywhere near the bonus she received (that she has already given back amid anger over the firm’s poor performance over sewage):
"Thames Water boss Sarah Bentley quits £1.6m a year job after giving up her bonus amid fury over sewage leaks."
TW aren't the only water company in serious financial trouble which raises the question what the fu*k was @ofwat doing the last 30 years?https://t.co/NI9dygWdbd
We don’t know how much her bonus totalled but last year she received £496,000.
Unlike many of the water firms, it turns out that this was much more than Thames Water shareholders received – they haven’t had a payout in six years, possibly because the business seems about to go down the pan:
Of all the privatisations Water privatisation has been the most egregious rip off, lining the pockets of many Tories & their friends. If Thames Water is brought back into public ownership, Labour must make it clear it will stay in public hands. https://t.co/T3Q3ZFYJnb
— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) June 27, 2023
Thames Water is an unusual case, though; since privatisation in the late 1980s, water companies have paid out £72 billion to shareholders.
Should this money have been invested in restoring the crumbling system? Has such investment been watered down to give a fast return to investors?
Panellists on the BBC’s Politics Live thrashed their way through these murky waters in two debates, when it seemed the Tory panellists, Bob Seely and Johnny Mercer, knew why this disaster has happened, but the left-wingers had the solution to it. See for yourself:
The funding system certainly seems to be sending our money down the drain.
But isn’t that because water is not appropriate for privatisation and is, as Mr McKenna suggested, a racket?
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Rishi Sunak: the sign behind him says his government’s priorities are “your priorities”. This would only be true if “you” referred to corporate bosses and shareholders, and there was only one priority listed: bloating profits by robbing customers with increased prices.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published information that proves inflation in the UK and other European countries is being driven by the greed of corporations that have been pushing their profits up for no good reason.
Here’s the evidence:
Rising corporate profits were the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years as companies increased prices by more than the spiking costs of imported energy. https://t.co/iEf6Emu0Rppic.twitter.com/HYulCZgb8p
The route to lower inflation is for companies to cut their profit margins, the IMF's deputy director @GitaGopinath said yesterday. "If inflation is to fall quickly, firms must allow their profit margins—which have shot up during the past two years—to decline and absorb some of…
(Some might say this applies only to countries in continental Europe but the question then is, why should it not apply to the UK too?)
So the answer to inflation is not to cut wages, and is not to increase interest rates; it is to force corporations to cut their bloated profit margins and pay for a rise in labour costs (increase wages).
This is the opposite of what Rishi Sunak and his corporate stooges in government have been saying since the crisis began. It seems clear that they have been lying to you all along.
And what’s he doing about it now?
His latest plan is to renege on all his promises about following the advice of pay review bodies:
BREAKING: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hinted he will ignore recommendations for public sector pay rises, saying workers "need to recognise the economic context we are in"https://t.co/uOqHlfMraA
“Workers need to recognise the economic context we are in.” Okay; well, this worker recognises that major corporations, many of which are probably donors to the Conservative Party and individual Tory MPs, have caused inflation by artificially increasing their prices. Now they’ve been caught doing it, they should cut their prices and increase wage to at least match the current inflation rate or be penalised for it.
This is what I expect my government to enforce.
(I don’t think it will happen for a single moment, but I do think that the longer Sunak refuses to do it, the more people will realise that he, his government and the corps funding them are all crooks and vampires, sucking out the lifeblood of the UK.)
Sunak is talking utter bollocks about it, of course:
2022 Steve Barclay says the right way forward for the government is to follow the independent pay review body
Sadly, there is no pressure from the Labour Party – the UK’s official Opposition to the government – to make Sunak and his bandits do the right thing. Labour is on their side and helping to rob us all.
This Writer will be writing to all those in government or able to influence it, calling for a change of policy to demand responsibility from the corporations, and I urge you to do the same.
But this time I think we’re all going to have to get out of our armchairs and onto the streets – possibly with blazing old-style torches and pitchforks – to demand action “or else”.
You know what I mean: French-style.
Or would you rather just lie back like a weakling and let these fat cats carry on robbing you?
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. This includes scrolling or continued navigation. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
