Tag Archives: company

Sewage dumping continues – does it happen near water SHAREHOLDERS’ homes?

Your nearest beach, yesterday: or at least, it might as well be.

Don’t pay attention to the political message if you don’t want to; the factual message is big enough:

The trouble is, we are getting excrement in our waterways and it is harming our environment and making people ill:

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:

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…

… or this:

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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Triathlon championship contestants fall ill after swimming in polluted water. Who pays?

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:

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:


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The big Tory lie: new North Sea gas and oil might not even come back to the UK

Grant Shapps: he likes to spout a lot of nonsense from his base in Welwyn Hatfield (this image is from a BBC interview in 2020) but he’s not so smooth when faced with an interviewer who has checked the facts before talking to him.

The 100 new contracts granted by Rishi Sunak for energy companies to drill for gas and oil in the North Sea do not mean those fossil fuels will be used in the UK, as he falsely claimed.

The drilling will be done by commercial firms who will then sell the fossil fuels they find on the international market. Some of it may come back to the UK but most of it probably won’t.

Here are the facts, presented by Sky’s Jayne Secker to a spluttering Grant Shapps:

Notice how he tried to change the subject when the facts were presented to him?

Oh, these substances have to go to the UK because they are processed here. But that doesn’t mean they are used here.

Oh, but not all of them are used for fuel. Some are turned into plastics. But plastic pollution is harming the planet as badly as global warming.

Oh, but some of it is used for medical devices within the NHS. But that’s a tiny amount that would not justify the granting of any more drilling licences.

It seems ever-more-clear that the new licences are more likely to be a way for Sunak to corruptly reward companies like BP for signing contracts with his father-in-law’s firm Infosys than to improve the UK’s energy security.

If Sunak and/or his government wish to deny this, then there is a simple way to clear the air:

Let’s have an independent public inquiry into the awarding of these contracts: what they are intended to do; the way they have been presented to the public; what the actual consequences are likely to be – and who benefits?


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NHS in danger on 75th anniversary as politicians compete to attack its founding principle

Tony Blair and his ventriloquist’s dummy Keir Starmer: they’re both demanding that more private companies should be allowed to take money from the National Health Service in profit. These are NOT the natural inheritors of Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee’s legacy.

The UK’s National Health Service is 75 years old today (July 5, 2023) – and the anniversary is being used by profiteers to demand that it be hollowed-out and turned into a vehicle for the sickness industry.

Today’s attack came from former New Labour prime minister Tony Blair. According to The Guardian,

Blair backs the private sector playing an expanded role, including in the provision of high-volume, low-complexity services, such as dermatology.

More people will resort to private healthcare unless the NHS banishes long treatment delays, Blair predicts.

In fairness, the piece quotes Dr John Puntis, the co-chair of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, who made it clear:

The Blair years demonstrated that with increased investment, NHS performance and patient satisfaction improved. On the other hand, use of the private sector undermined NHS services, and independent sector treatment centres pushed up costs

So the answer is more investment in NHS treatment and less in the private sector, according to expert opinion.

Sadly, current Labour leader Keir Starmer seems to agree with Blair – he wants to put more investment into private healthcare in a betrayal of his own mother, it seems. You can read his Mirror article here, if you really think it will illuminate you. He doesn’t say anything at all about what Labour would do to restore the health service.

But we do know what he would do, because he has let it slip in a TV interview. Blair’s words are an echo of Starmer’s new New Labour policy:

The bright idea is that the politicians – Tory and Labour – defund the NHS so it becomes unable to tackle the ever-increasing waiting list of patients that health-reducing political policies are creating (sewage dumping, anybody?) – and this pushes people towards the private, profit-making sickness industry.

The private companies set their prices for particular treatments low, so patients are surprised at not being asked to pay the fortune they expected. They tell their friends, who also go private, until we reach the point at which the government (Labour or Tory, it doesn’t matter which) can say private treatment is the answer and shut down the NHS altogether.

Then healthcare prices skyrocket.

What would Starmer get out of it?

Well, I don’t know.

I do know he’s getting something from private health right now:

Wow: £12,500. That’s more than some people earn every year.

Ironically, this appeared on my Twitter feed at the same time as the Starmer clip:

How sad that This Writer has to link a tweet about MPs pretending to care about the NHS with the current and former leaders of the political party that brought it into being. What a betrayal of the people of the UK!

Thankfully, there are still some in the Labour Party who support the principles on which the NHS was founded. Sadly, Richard Burgon is being kept far from any position of power by Starmer and his cronies. This may be the reason:

Starmer isn’t the only one with a story about how the NHS changed his life. But members of the commenting public are tying theirs to the decline in investment over the last 13 years of Tory and Tory-led rule:

And then there’s the issue of wasted money – raised by this caller to Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 Live show:

Former Countdown numbers expert – the respectable one – Carol Vorderman has also spoken out about government decisions to give money that should have helped the NHS to their know-nothing friends (via an illegal ‘fast track’ funding lane):

I notice also a clip from an organisation called European Movement UK, reminding us all that we were told Brexit would make £350 million per week available that could be put into the NHS:

Where is that money?

The answer is obvious: it was fictional.

As is the story of private health businesses being of any benefit at all to the National Health Service.


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We’ve been told lies about Thames Water’s profits – and the cost of cleaning the sewage

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:

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:

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.


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Keep track of corporations that break the law with this handy tool

Sewage dumping: it’s the most visible example of corporate rule violations in the UK right now – but not the only one.

This is another public service announcement:

The site’s introductory statement says:

Violation Tracker UK is the first wide-ranging database of enforcement actions brought against companies by government regulators in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It contains more than 80,000 cases involving issues such as financial misconduct, workplace abuses, environmental offences and anti-competitive practices.

It combines cases resolved since 2010 from over 50 regulatory agencies. Violation Tracker is produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

This Writer would guess that Prem Sikka has found Violation Tracker UK because of his interest in infringements by the privatised water companies.

But now that he has found and publicised it, we can use it to check up on anyone we like, including privatised utilities and companies owned by political donors.

Feel free to give it a go – and let us know about any really shocking breaches you find!


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This MP wanted special treatment on private health donations map – but won’t get it

Stella Creasy in Parliament: if she’s working for a private health insurance firm outside its walls, what is she saying within them?

Campaigning group Every Doctor has rejected a demand by Labour’s Stella Creasy to remove her from an interactive map listing every MP who has received a donation from companies involved in the private takeover of the UK’s National Health Service.

Creasy thought that she should not be included because she donated a payment from insurance firm Aviva to charity.

But after consulting its lawyer, Every Doctor pointed out that the concern is not where the money goes, but how it was obtained.

Here’s the full explanation:

Indeed.

We (the public) didn’t know from the Register of Members’ Interests which charity benefited, and we don’t know what Creasy said during the panel appearance for which Aviva paid her; we must presume she was putting forward a view held by that firm, otherwise it would not have employed her.

The inclusion of Aviva on the map has been questioned because it insures other things besides health – but Every Doctor has answered that concern:

(This should worry anybody who supports the NHS because it indicates that the Tory policy of turning people away from the NHS to seek private healthcare – supported by insurance – is working.)

Critics have also claimed that receiving payment from a health (among other things) insurance firm is okay because it was donated to a charity shelter for homeless people – that Aviva already supports.

From This Writer’s point of view, it is unacceptable that Creasy provided a service for Aviva and took money for it, no matter where it went.

By handing the cash to a homeless shelter, she get kudos for being a humanitarian. But the shelter is funded by the company that paid her in any event, so it seems possible that she was advised (directed?) to send it there – and that would be a questionable act.

But the fundamental issue is that she provided work for a private healthcare firm when her only concern should be working in the interests of the people of the UK.

We don’t know what she said on this panel for which she was hired by Aviva. We may assume that, as Aviva paid her, she was there to represent that company’s interests – but because she is an MP, attendees may have been misled into thinking she was putting forward Labour Party policy.

And we don’t know how working for Aviva will affect the way she’ll vote on health issues in Parliament. Did the payment depend on her support for private health involvement in the NHS in the future? We don’t know.

I think it would be advisable to watch her future behaviour in Parliamentary votes very carefully – and for that to happen, we need to know why it is important to do so.

Therefore I support Every Doctor’s decision. Creasy should remain on the map and the fact that she received this money in this way should be visible to everybody.


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Former Shadow Chancellor confirms water and energy privatisation are riddled with corruption

John McDonnell: he knows exactly what’s been going on in the water companies since privatisation.

It’s always welcome when a senior politician confirms one’s suspicions.

In an article yesterday (May 20, 2023), This Writer suggested that greed has overtaken service provision in the boardrooms of both the privatised water and energy firms.

Now we discover that former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has reached much the same conclusion.

In an article published by the Yorkshire Post, he stated:

The water industry is second only to the energy industry in ripping off the British public. Since privatisation, the water companies have stolen from the average consumer of water in this country.

He added some details to the story of water privatisation, too:

Privatisation was meant to reduce prices, increase investment and make the industry more accountable to the wider public through shareholding. That has not been the case.

Those of you who have been following this issue on Vox Political will know I’ve stated that privatisation was meant to reduce prices and increase investment.

As for making the industry accountable to the wider public through shareholding, I’m not sure how that is supposed to be better than nationalisation, which makes the industry accountable to us all, rather than the comparatively few people who own company shares.

In any case,

It is not more accountable through shareholding, because most of the companies that now own British water are owned by overseas shareholders.

That’s overseas shareholders who own most of the British water companies, and not pension funds – as some apologists for privatisation have tried to claim.

And what has happened?

Since 1989, real water bills have risen 50 per cent. Since 2010, bills have gone up by more than 12.5 per cent. At the same time, individual family incomes have gone down by five per cent.

This is interesting:

Significant investment has been made in the infrastructure, but the problem is that since the 1990s that has declined as a proportion of the overall turnover of the industry.

How strange. Significant investment, yet the system leaks like a sieve. One hesitates to image what it would be like without this ever-decreasing contribution.

Most of the money we’ve paid the water firms, on the other hand,

has gone into paying interest charges on water company debts or dividends to their owners and shareholders.

It has now been exposed that some of the borrowing is being used to pay dividends to shareholders and high salaries to chief executives and board directors.

Six UK water companies took high-interest loans from their owners through the Channel Islands and then converted them into euro bonds. They then lent them back to the companies and paid virtually no tax on them whatsoever.

This is a tax scam for which these water companies are used as a vehicle… This is a scandal.

Mr McDonnell recommends, rather than privatisation, a shift to the not-for-profit company model exemplified by Welsh Water.

It’s nice to know that This Writer’s local water company is considered the way of the future by at least one influential politician – but I still think re-nationalisation is best; it eliminates the risk of corruption altogether (or, at least, should).

But what’s to be done about the scandal(s) that Mr McDonnell has identified?

Under the current government – nothing, most likely.

So we need a better government.

If more young people were encouraged to vote, we might actually get it. And it is in their best interest.

After all, it’s the young who’ll suffer the most over the long term if rampant water corruption and profiteering isn’t halted – not to mention the sewage scandal.

Source: John McDonnell: Our money seeps away into profiteering by water firms | Yorkshire Post


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The water companies show us every day why they should be re-nationalised. Why won’t the politicians do it?

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

Now, how do you propose to do that?

Here’s why MPs are so keen on private health companies

Wes Streeting: the Shadow Health Secretary took £22,500 in donations from private health firms last year, according to EveryDoctor’s interactive map. Why would he end NHS privatisation and stop that money from coming to him?

Did you ever hear of an organisation called EveryDoctor?

It’s a group of doctors campaigning to revive the National Health Service in the face of huge political effort – from both main parties – to kill it off in favour of private companies.

And it has compiled an interactive map showing not only the extent of Tory-driven privatisation, but MPs’ interests in private health firms.

Here’s the tweet announcing it:

To provide a taste of what you’ll find if you use the map, the organisation has been tweeting interesting entries on it:

The really important element to grasp is that it isn’t only Tories who are making money from private health. Look at this:

This is the Shadow Health Secretary. Perhaps now Labour’s about-turn on health policy, so it now supports the increased use of private companies, makes more sense.

Here’s another Labour donation – but this one went straight to the top: Keir Starmer took £12,500 from a private health firm.

Do you really think he’s going to bite the hand that feeds him by returning the NHS to the principles on which it was founded and kicking private profit-makers out?

It seems unlikely to me.

Yvette Cooper’s take has been massive:

It seems clear that this is the reason neither Labour nor the Tories want to rid your health service of the private, profit-making parasites:

They are taking donations from those firms.


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