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!
Housebuilding: the Tories have been looking for something on which they can blame their failure to build enough new homes – and have found it in the form of legal protections for river life. So they are scrapping those protections and forcing you to pay for pollution prevention measures.
Exactly as This Site predicted only hours ago, evidence is showing that a Tory government decision to scrap “nutrient neutrality” rules that protect river life from harm caused by housing developments is creating huge profits for builders.
Meanwhile, the cost of cleaning up their mess is set to fall on the public purse.
Here’s the evidence about building firms:
And there you have it, what today's announcement was actually all about.
Barratt Developments' share price up 3.43% this morning company now valued at £4.34bn and Taylor Wimpey up 2.88% company valued at £3.97bn.
And The Guardianis saying the following about how the bill for their pollution will now be paid:
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”, adding that while “the polluter pays principle is very important”, it was having too many adverse impacts on small- and medium-sized housebuilders.
So there you have it.
You paid for the privatised energy companies’ enormous profits. You paid for the privatised water firms to pollute our rivers. And now you are to pay for mitigation of the already-private builders’ attempts to kill off any remaining life in our waterways – if such mitigation ever happens.
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!
Theresa Villiers: she says her failure to declare £70,000 worth of shares in Shell was an “oversight”. Was it really, though? What else has she failed to share?
This is shocking: when she was the government member charged with caring for our environment, Theresa Villiers had £70,000 worth of shares in mass-polluter Shell oil.
She is the MP for Chipping Barnet, where constituents should be outraged that she has been working for the enrichment of that firm (and therefore increased profits for herself) rather than in their interests.
That firm recently announced profits of $5 billion (US), which is admittedly down from the £7.7 billion (UK) it made in the first quarter of 2023. Of that, £6 billion found its way into the bank accounts of shareholders like Ms Villiers.
Shell stock is currently worth around £24 – higher than the £19.41 when Ms Villiers left office as Environment Secretary, so she’s making a bit of a killing.
She says her failure to declare this enormous conflict of interest was an oversight that won’t happen again:
Anna Jones – Theresa Villiers(Tory MP) owned £70k worth of shares in Shell when she was environment secretary, that wasn't declared for 5 years… what do you make of that?
The only reason it won’t happen again is that she has been caught red-handed and knows she can’t hide this any more.
What else has she been hiding, though?
It seems clear that there is only one way to keep this woman from lying – call it what it is – about business interests that create conflicts with her duty to the nation.
That is to ensure that she cannot have a job in which such conflicts arise.
If Ms Villiers is more interested in making money for herself than in safeguarding the interests and well-being of the United Kingdom as a whole, then she should be forced back into the private sector.
No doubt she’ll quickly find work with a firm that has profited from UK government policy.
She might do well by sending her CV to Shell.
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!
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.
