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
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Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?
Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.
Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.
Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.
Crumbling schools and hospitals.
Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.
Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):
14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.
A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.
Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.
A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.
The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.
Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.
Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:
In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.
Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?
Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.
Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.
Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?
Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:
Who the f*ck looks at record NHS waiting lists, families unable to afford basics, a railway that would shame most countries, our coastline and rivers thick with sewage, social care in crisis, a completely broken immigration system, unaffordable housing and say ‘I’ll vote Tory’?
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It was an innocent question; I don’t know anything about tidal flows between England and Scotland (why should I?), and there really is an awful lot of ordure being pumped into English waters right now.
The response I received was astonishing – particularly in political terms. Example:
I'm fascinated to learn from the responses to my innocent question that I'm a Scottish Nationalist, despite opposing Scottish independence. Makes me question any other information coming from such biased sources.
It turns out I was right to question this information; I was just mistaken about the basis for questioning it.
Thankfully we have Martin Odoni of The Critique Archives to put us straight.
Here he is:
Note the pains Neil goes to quite needlessly to stress that the authority responsible for overseeing sewer overflows is a nationalised utility, subtly encouraging readers to imagine that the problem is caused by ‘inefficient public industry.’ But also, look closely at his claim and see if you can spot where he might be fiddling the arithmetic.
The Times offers a similar spin on this in its headline, but look closer at the text, and you soon realise we are being deliberately misled.
Sewage-related debris made up 17.9 per cent of litter on beaches in Scotland, compared with an average of 8.9 per cent on beaches throughout the UK in 2022.
What the MCS have actually found is that there is an eight-times-higher proportion of sewage-debris in the litter on Scottish beaches than in the litter on English or Welsh beaches. That would only mean there is eight times as much sewage on Scottish beaches as on English ones if there is exactly the same quantity of litter on Scottish beaches. The ‘eight-times-the-proportion’ figure does not substantiate the claim that there is eight times the total.
It seems the real difficulty that the MCS was trying to draw attention to is there is a lack of monitoring of sewage outlets in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK, so we do not actually know the accurate amount of sewage debris on Scottish beaches, or even of litter in general.
There does appear to be proportionally more litter on Scottish beaches (492 items per 100m) than on English beaches (309 per 100m), but that information only comes from volunteer clean-up operations and so is unscientific.
“Moreover,” Mr Odoni adds,
the English coastline is 2,748 miles long. The Scottish coastline is well over twice as long at 6,160 miles, due to the considerably greater ‘zig-zagging’ of Scottish beaches and the extensive peninsulae, which would substantially mitigate the bare amounts of litter involved.
This is not to say that Scotland doesn’t have a sewage-related litter problem:
On balance from what information there is, there probably is somewhat more sewage-debris on Scottish beaches than on English ones.
But This Writer can wholeheartedly join with Mr Odoni in suggesting:
The snake-ish attempt by Neil to give the impression that it is eight times higher, and that purely to smear nationalised companies, is a vintage example of how misleading his brand of ‘journalism’ is.
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Rivers of S**: unbelievably, the Tory government and regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency reckon they have not broken the law by failing to regulate this torrent of untreated sewage properly.
Unbelievable but true: the UK’s Tory government is digging its heels in and insisting that it, together with regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency, has not broken the law over how it regulates sewage releases into the UK’s waterways.
The UK’s environment watchdog suspects the government and water regulators have broken the law over how they regulate sewage releases.
It follows continued high levels of sewage releases in England which topped 825 times a day last year.
Campaigners and opposition MPs have called the regulators “complicit” in allowing the pollution.
The government said it did not agree with the Office for Environmental Protection’s “initial interpretations”.
Following complaints to the OEP over sewage in June 2022 it announced it was investigating whether England’s regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, along with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), were correctly enforcing the law on water companies.
In response to the announcement the government said: “The volume of sewage discharged is completely unacceptable. That is why we are the first government in history to take such comprehensive action to tackle it.”
That is hardly an alibi as it is the first UK government in history that needed to!
As for the substantive complaint – that far too much untreated sewage is stinking up our waterways – the instinctive urge is to come out with a lavatorial expletive like, “No sh**, Sherlock!”
It seems clear that there is far too much sh** flying around – as much from the mouths of government spokespeople as from privatised water firms’ pipes.
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The trouble is, we are getting excrement in our waterways and it is harming our environment and making people ill:
Harlyn Bay, Cornwall back in the news again. Not in the least shocking considering there had been 13 sewage dumps between 18 June and 18 August with 8 in July alone.
Meanwhile, look at the benefits reaped by shareholders who aren’t paying for the materials to clean our water and are instead just flushing it into our rivers:
Between 2012 – 2022 @AnglianWater paid shareholders £4.6 billion and now they want to put up your water bill because they didn't spend enough on infrastructure.
It seems to This Writer that one way of ensuring the water firms didn’t abuse their government-backed ability to pump crap at us whenever they felt like it would have been simple: make it a legal requirement for them to pump sewage into shareholders’ and executives’ neighbourhoods before anywhere else.
It’s very easy to green-light flooding a place with disease-ridden goop when it isn’t the place where you live. I wonder whether water bosses would be quite so enthusiastic if they had to face irate neighbours to justify incidents like this…
Toxic blue-green algae on the River Bann, NI. The river is fed from the now heavily polluted Lough Neagh with all of that crap emptying into the Atlantic ocean at Castlerock.
The River Bann used to be one of the finest salmon rivers in western Europe.https://t.co/smbRjQESLp
It’s a measure that never seems to occur to our Tory legislators, who are quite happy for the outflows to release their loads into other people’s back yards.
And what can you do about it?
Well, maybe you don’t like the Green Party, whose campaign image appears above – but you don’t have to put up with the crap dished out at you by the other two parties mentioned in that image. Find somebody who won’t fill your life with unnecessary excrement and support them instead.
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Poison: people are falling ill from ingesting water polluted with raw sewage, after the Tory government allowed privatised firms to dump sewage into our rivers, untreated. Why are the Tories allowing it to go on, now the hazards are clear? Is there a financial incentive for them? What is it?
Following up on the announcement that 57 swimmers were ill after swimming in waters polluted with 39 times the normal amount of e.coli bacteria, here are a couple more news articles indicating the growing scale of the problem.
"Hunstanton mayor says no-swim warning is 'scaremongering'."
But what do the Tories get out of poisoning our waters, our land and, ultimately, us? Are they getting a backhander we can’t see? If, not, then where’s the incentive?
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A prediction that has come true: water discharged into rivers and seas isn’t expected to be drunk. But it has been – and it was full of raw, untreated sewage because the government has allowed privatised water firms to avoid the expense of purifying this water. Will that decision come back to haunt the politicians and the water tycoons now people have become ill?
This should be self-explanatory:
57 swimmers in the World Triathlon Championship on Sunderland beach fell sick and got diarrhoea last weekend.
Sampling showed E Coli levels to be 39 times higher than usual.
We must end privatisation of our water to stop sewage being discharged into our rivers and seas.
— Breakthrough Party 🟠🌤️ (@BThroughParty) August 6, 2023
2023: BBC News, "57 swimmers were taken ill following a world triathlon race in Sunderland."
2019: Theresa May to Zac Goldsmith, "We are committed to ensuring our environmental standards do not fall after Brexit.. It is our desire to enhance our environmental standards in the… pic.twitter.com/PzsWHSxvPr
The allegation is clear: people participating in the World Triathlon Championship Series in Sunderland have fallen ill after swimming in waters that have been found unexpectedly to have been polluted.
Swimmers complained that they were swimming “in shit”.
The local privatised water firm has denied any responsibility – but who else would have been capable of doing it?
This could be a crucial test case, regarding the continued – government-supported – pollution of the UK’s waterways with raw sewage.
It seems the UK’s Tory government, by allowing the privatised water firms to avoid their responsibility to purify water before releasing it back into the environment, has actively supported the infection of the nation’s citizens with disease.
It occurs to This Writer that, if evidence can be found linking the swimmers’ illnesses with the release of contaminated water by the company, then the organisers of the event – and the individual swimmers – would have a strong case for compensation against both the firm and the UK’s government.
Taking it further – if such a case is won, the Tory MPs who supported dumping raw sewage into the UK’s waterways won’t be too badly inconvenienced; it will be the public – those their decision has harmed – who will pay the legal bill and any fines.
But we should all remember it at election time. Right?
Oh look – here’s visual evidence of what’s happening all around our coasts right now:
Yaaaaaay another Brexit benefit… Sewage Sovereignty!
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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.
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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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