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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This is fine: the image above was originally about climate change but it may be applied equally well to Rishi Sunak’s attitude to the economy. Political policy in the UK for the past 40 years and more has been to impoverish you, together with all the poor people who voted for him and his ilk, thereby allowing it to happen.
All the Tory talk about getting inflation down seems to have confused some people who have failed to consider that high inflation may actually be Conservative government policy.
Look at the usually-excellent Simon Wren-Lewis’s latest Mainly Macropiece, in which he takes issue with left-wing opinions about his current diagnosis of the inflation problem.
He reckons the answer is for private sector wage rises to come down, probably by way of reducing economic demand which will lead to a reduction in the workforce – and, thereby, a recession. This opinion appears to be shared with the Bank of England, whose continual interest rate hikes seem to be an attempt to force the UK’s economy to go backwards.
The problem with that is simple: ordinary working- and even some middle-class people are struggling to make ends meet. Many simply can’t and are going into debt. His solution to the inflation problem will bake that inability to afford the cost of living into the UK economy.
With the Tory government lying to us that workers’ wages are the cause of high inflation and the Bank of England doing as described above, there seems to be only one logical conclusion to draw:
High inflation is a Conservative government policy. It is intended to drive the UK’s lower-paid citizens deep into poverty so you cannot afford the necessities of life.
Just roll that around your mind for a moment.
Think about the real causes of inflation: huge increases in the prices of energy and food, and huge increases in the salaries of FTSE100 executives.
The government could, in theory, neutralise these inflationary pressures through taxation – but the theory fails in practice: as Professor Wren-Lewis notes, the energy firms are multi-national corporations whose profits are received overseas, so there is nothing the government can do about them.
Looking back through history, we see that the reason overseas shareholders have been able to take control of our formerly-nationalised utility firms (energy isn’t the only subject area to have been treated this way, of course; water springs instantly to mind) is privatisation.
The answer should be re-nationalisation – but the Tory government (and also Keir Starmer’s STP – Substitute Tory Party) won’t countenance that; it is against their ideology. This indicates, again, that high inflation that drives you into poverty is a political choice. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer want you to starve.
In the private sector, we see that the salaries of FTSE100 executives have risen by an average of 16 per cent in the last year alone, despite the fact that there has been no real growth in production in the last 15 years since the Great Recession. The money for their pay rise has to come from somewhere and the logical source is the pay packets of employees; they are taking the rises that should go to you.
That’s if they haven’t increased the prices of their goods or services, of course. If they have then they are still taking the rises that should go to you, while also increasing prices so you can’t afford what your employer sells.
The answer – the way to stop this irresponsible upward drain of corporate funds into executive bank accounts – is to tax executive pay at a rate high enough to make this practice unviable. Again, both Rishi Sunak’s Tories and Keir Starmer’s Tories have refused to do this so – again – we must conclude that the executive wage inflation that puts us all into poverty is a political choice.
Professor Wren-Lewis rightly points out that, where employees have won wage increases intended to match inflation caused mainly by high energy prices, their employers have put prices up; this indicates that shifting the real-terms wage cut onto the profits of other firms won’t work and just generates more inflation.
Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to discuss the reason real wages in the UK have not grown in the last 15 years. As already mentioned above, besides the energy and food price hikes, it is the fact that productivity growth has been extremely weak. There have also been two large devaluations of the Pound.
The low productivity – and one of the depreciations – were caused by Brexit. This is another political policy of the Conservative government that is also supported by Keir Starmer’s STP and may therefore be seen as further proof that the party of government (and that of Opposition) intends to impoverish you as a matter of policy.
Brexit also makes causing a recession more attractive to the government and the party that wants to form a government. Neither of them want inflation to continue running rampant forever; it would eventually wipe out the gains they have made for their very rich friends, so they’ll want to bring it down.
The way to do that, according to Prof Wren-Lewis, is to reduce the demand for goods produced by most firms, as this will lead to a reduced demand for labour; firms then lay off workers, meaning more people are seeking employment, meaning in turn that jobseekers will be more likely to accept a job that pays lower wages.
Before Brexit, politicians could always rely on an influx of cheap labour from Europe. That isn’t available now, so they consider recession to be the only alternative. Remember: their future is safe.
Demand is already coming down because people simply can’t afford to buy as much as they used to, due to the real-terms wage cuts they have suffered. The Bank of England’s interest rate rises are hammering that change home.
We may therefore conclude that recession, job losses, further deprivation and misery are all policy points of the Conservative government, and of Keir Starmer’s STP.
Professor Wren-Lewis ends his piece by quoting Bertrand Russell: “Ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”
Sadly, he fails to follow his own (and Russell’s) advice.
The truth that the facts bear out is that privatisation, executive pay rises, Brexit, austerity (the other driver of the Pound’s depreciation) and interest rate rises are all intended to push the majority of UK citizens into poverty.
Other solutions besides reducing demand by causing a recession and mass unemployment are available – but the low-quality politicians with whom we have accepted that Parliament should be filled are not interested in them; their only concern is filling their own bank accounts.
Our concern must now be to put a stop to this.
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Exposed: payments to LABOUR Health spokesman from private health firms
Under Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, Labour Party policy has changed from returning the National Health Service to full public control into allowing it to be converted into even more of a front for private firms to profit from your illness.
Is the reason for this the fact that Streeting is being paid a small fortune every year by private health representatives? See for yourself:
Energy prices are coming down at last, so what is the regulator Ofgem doing? It’s consulting the companies on a plan to increase their profit so they can be “financially resilient”.
They just made a killing (sadly, in some cases this may be said to be literal) on prices over the last year but this cash went straight to shareholders, it seems. Wouldn’t it have been better to fix dividends at a lower level and put more of that money into “financial resilience” rather than fleecing the public again?
'People will be staggered to hear that you are consulting on increasing the amount of profit that energy firms are allowed to make. That's not the best timing is it?' @MartinSLewis
Ofgem boss Jonathan Brearley says the increase is to make sure 'companies are resilient'. pic.twitter.com/mVKnPQKIUo
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The price of Brexit: lorries waiting at Dover for the paperwork to be done.
Would you like to know why this is important?
Britain’s departure from the European Union has accounted for about a third of the increase in food bills for households since 2019, equivalent to about 250 pounds ($316), researchers from the London School of Economics and other universities said.
Although London and Brussels have an agreement allowing largely tariff-free trade in goods, barriers to exports and imports in the form of paperwork, known as non-tariff barriers, have caused delays and higher costs.
The answer is simple, if you remember:
When we were being asked to vote in the EU referendum, back in 2016, we were told again and again that Brexit would reduce paperwork, bureaucracy and red tape.
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Shortfall: business bosses are pushing up prices in line with nothing more than their own greed, and we’re being told to meet these extra charges despite real-terms wages cuts.
Inflation has slowed from 10.1 per cent in March to 8.7 per cent in April – a tiny decrease of 1.4 per cent, suggesting that Rishi Sunak’s aim to halve inflation will not be reached for a long time.
The figure is now being driven by food price rises. These increases could be due to Brexit, and the extra costs now associated with bringing goods into the UK from Europe, and they could be due to the fact that EU workers are no longer coming to the UK to pick our own crops, meaning much of them have been left to rot instead.
(Or at least, that’s what we’ve been told.)
The other possible reason is that this is greedflation– that prices have been raised opportunistically by supermarket bosses who have enjoyed massive increases in profit as a result.
Grocery price rises stand at 19.1 per cent. They’ve slowed but that’s no consolation when it’s a climbdown from record highs.
It is clear that much of the reason for the current high inflation rate is Tory government – decisions by the Tories have artificially increased prices and, coupled with their efforts to cut workers’ pay, may be considered deliberate attempts to impoverish millions of people.
Successful attempts as well: more than 14 million of us – nearly a quarter of the population – are now struggling.
What’s to be done?
There certainly seems to be an argument for the introduction of a grocery price regulator, albeit with more teeth than those in the energy and water industries (as we’ve seen lately).
If supermarket owners are determined to push prices through the roof, isn’t it time a cap was imposed?
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Square meals: remember when vulnerable children were going to go hungry during the school holidays because the Tory government couldn’t care less, and had to have its collective mind changed by footballer Marcus Rashford?
Ladies and gentlemen, you are not reading enough social media journalism!
I know – that’s another blanket statement. Disagree with it wildly if you like but as a population, people in the UK have been conditioned to ignore social media journalism by sites like Facebook, that restrict their readership to a tiny fraction of a site’s followers and then try to charge us money to reach even a tiny fraction of the rest.
Let’s try to fix that by promoting sites that provide valuable information that you won’t get from the Tory lackeys in the mainstream media.
In other words, here’s Charlotte Hughes:
Recent studies have shown that hunger and malnourishment can have a severe impact on a child’s mental and physical development, which can ultimately affect their academic performance and life opportunities.
An ever increasing number of children are now living in poverty as a result of the cost of living crisis, increasing energy costs, parents losing their jobs and DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) issues such as benefit sanctions.
According to the End Child Poverty coalition, 4.2 million children in the UK are living in poverty, 2.4 million of whom are living in severe poverty. Poverty is a significant driver of hunger and food insecurity, with many families struggling to afford and find healthy and nutritious food.
The effects of hunger and malnutrition on a child’s learning can be very profound. Children who experience hunger often find it difficult to concentrate and focus, affecting their memory and cognitive abilities.
This can also lead to behavioral issues, affecting their interactions with others and their overall development.
Moreover, poor nutrition can significantly affect a child’s physical development, leading to a lack of energy, poor growth, and an increased likelihood of illness.
One recent study found that children who experienced hunger were more likely to have lower academic performance and to struggle with basic literacy and numeracy. Children who eat more healthily and more varied diets also have better cognitive abilities, and in many cases have better academic outcomes.
Whilst there are interventions such as breakfast clubs and food banks that can help alleviate these problems, and it is vitally important for policymakers, schools, and charities to work together to ensure that all children have access to the resources they need to thrive… sadly at the time of writing the government is very reluctant to help at all. Instead the cost of living crisis and rising energy costs are continuing to increase plunging more children and their families further into poverty.
Is the government doing this purposely? It certainly makes me suspect this. The health and wellbeing of working class children appears to be unimportant to them.
Charlotte doesn’t offer any solutions but it is clear that only one will do: regime change.
We need a different government with better priorities – and, by the way, in This Writer’s opinion Keir Starmer’s Labour simply won’t be good enough.
If you’re not keen to do anything yourself, quite yet, then at least visit the Poor Side of Life website and subscribe to it. Then you’ll be able to keep informed.
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Rishi Sunak: he’s full of avarice and so are the supermarket bosses.
Rishi Sunak met around 70 food industry leaders at Downing Street today (May 16) to discuss ways to bring down the cost of food. It won’t do any good.
Food inflation rate in the UK, March 2015-December 2022.
The BBC News article about the meeting featured a lot of bleeding-heart talk by the people who create the actual food, saying their operational and shipping costs have increased hugely.
It doesn’t mention the fact that supermarket chains like Tesco hugely increased their profits last year.
Tesco profits between 2015-22.
Sainsbury profits 2014-15 to 2021-22.
There is no monitoring of cost prices and selling prices of food sold in supermarkets – and profit margins keep rising. This, in turn keeps inflation high.
Meanwhile, politically-motivated pundits like Ann Widdecombe on the BBC’s Politics Live tell us that it is demands for wages to rise in line with costs that triggers high inflation. This is not true – it’s just a lie to keep you poor.
Sunak won’t do the necessary, of course. Regulation is anathema to a Conservative.
High inflation, coupled with low wages, means he can get away with a bigger lie – claiming that public services (including the NHS) are not affordable.
In a balanced economy, in which the proceeds of the economy were shared fairly between business owners, executives and employees, so that everybody was able to pay a fair share towards the public good, we could have our public services and cheap, nutritious food.
We don’t get it for a simple reason: Rishi Sunak and his government don’t want us to have it.
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French protesters have stormed the Paris stock exchange: will greedflation prompt the British to do worse?
Whenever the Conservatives tell us wage increases are driving inflation, be aware that they are lying.
Inflation isn’t being driven by wage demands but by greedy companies that are using the cost-of-living crisis to drive up prices and boost their profits.
Take a look at the degree by which food prices have risen:
Claudia Webbe puts the situation – and the reason for it – in a nutshell:
The price of food rose at the fastest rate in more than 45 years in the 12 months to March 2023. Food inflation is now at 19.2%; one in six adults (16%) in Britain are now classed as food insecure.
Meanwhile food corporations are raking in billions. It’s a profit greed crisis
That is what the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank seem to have discovered, according to The Guardian:
The IMF and the ECB wouldn’t put it in these terms, of course, but both support the idea that companies are gouging their customers when they can. The non-technical term for what is going on is greedflation.
Companies [are] doing rather better out of the cost of living crisis than workers… The flipside of steeply rising prices but only modestly higher wages [is] that profit margins [have] “surged”.
Unite, one of the UK’s biggest unions, published a report in March that blamed systematic profiteering across the economy for fuelling the cost of living crisis. Energy companies, supermarkets, shipping companies, car dealers and food manufacturers had all cashed in on drought, war, and strong demand after the pandemic to “push prices and profits through the roof”.
The eurozone’s central bank looked at the contribution of profits to inflation over nearly a quarter of century, and found that between 1999 and 2022, profits were responsible for one-third of the inflation rate on average. In 2022 alone, profits contributed to two-thirds of the rise.
But whereas the ECB – from its president, Christine Lagarde, downwards – is fully exercised by the threat posed by greedflation, policymakers in the UK seem far more relaxed. There have been plenty of calls for wage restraint, most notably from Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, but far fewer for price restraint… Price controls, of the sort used in the 1970s, are seen as to be avoided at all costs.
Instead, inflation is being controlled by increasing interest rates – which sucks demand from the economy and reduces pressure for wage rises by incurring job losses (meaning that, once again, too many jobseekers end up competing for too few jobs and the bosses can pay whatever they want).
But workers who have taken pay cut after pay cut for more than a decade are close to breaking point and something has to give way soon.
Will we see scenes like what has happened in France over pensions, with protesters storming bastions of capitalism like the stock exchange and trashing it? Will we see worse?
It’s a good question. The British have very long tempers and have put up with a lot – so much, in fact, that nobody knows what they might do if those tempers snap.
It seems likely that, if they do not moderate their own rhetoric and curb corporate greedflation soon, the Tories might find out.
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Jeremy Hunt: he’s all right, Jack, because he has public money propping up his worthless hide. You aren’t so lucky.
Inflation figures for March 2023 have been released – and they foretell continued agony for struggling UK citizens who are trying to make ends meet in the face of Tory tomfoolery.
The baseline figure has – stubbornly, we are told, as if inflation is a sentient creature – remained above 10 per cent, falling from 10.4 in February just three-tenths of a percentage point to 10.1 per cent in March.
The reason wasn’t energy prices this time, though. No… it’s food.
The average price of food and non-alcoholic drinks has risen by a whopping 19.1 per cent in the year to March 2023 – the sharpest 12-month increase since August 1977.
This is partly because the availability of fruit, vegetables and sugar was hit by poor harvests in Europe and North Africa.
And importing those goods has become more expensive because the pound’s performance on the currency markets has been weak.
Furthermore, higher energy bills have meant increased transport costs and global supply chain disruption between March 2022 and January this year.
These energy bills, caused by the war in Ukraine, have forced producers to hike their prices.
Much of the above can be attributed to Brexit, which has added hundreds of pounds to the average UK household shopping bill due to increased transport and customs costs.
And the domestic apple-growing industry has suffered due to a lack of workers from the Continent, high energy costs, and low cash returns from supermarkets that buy the produce.
Martin Deboo, consumer goods analyst at Jefferies, warned that the high prices are unlikely to fall, following the sharpest 12-month increase since August 1977.
He said: “Absolute pricing rarely falls very much.
“We expect consumers to be paying permanently more for products in 2023 onwards than they did in 2021.
This is particularly bad news for those of us on lower incomes, who are already struggling to make ends meet.
The Bank of England may decide that another interest rate increase is necessary, in which case many people with mortgages may be in danger of losing their homes.
In the midst of this, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has stepped in to claim – improbably – that “we can get through this”:
This Writer wonders who the “we” might be who can “get through this”. Is it just high-waged Tories?
I think Hunt’s words are a sop for people who are about to lose much of what they have spent their lives building – due to the ignorance and stupidity of the Conservative government in which he is a senior figure.
He just wants to keep us all tranquillised and quiet so we don’t end up protesting French-style.
But if anybody has an excuse to set their country on fire, it’s us.
The super-selfish Tories, with their Brexit and their privatisations, have deliberately harmed our quality of life. Saying “we can get through this” is no consolation at all.
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There is massive misinformation by Therese Coffey here. Water is getting worse. 93% is not good, as she claims. Only 14% is good according to her own departmental statistics. And £56bn is not enough to tackle this. £260bn is required. Why is she lying about this? https://t.co/Xq2XK4tK1R
Speaking at the launch of the government’s Plan for Water, Ms Coffey said the River Don in Yorkshire will never be given a high status without dismantling half of Sheffield.
“Achieving the gold standard for ecological status would mean taking us back to the natural state of our rivers from the year 1840,” Ms Coffey said.
“That’s neither practical nor indeed desirable in the circumstances. We’re not going to take London back to before the embankment was built or remove the Thames Barrier and, indeed, we’ll need another before the end of the century.
“And no one is contemplating dismantling half of Sheffield to let the River Don run free, but without that it will never be scored as being excellent, even though salmon have returned to that part of the River Don for the first time in two years.”
Feargal had a few things to say about that:
He said: “She’s conflating what was a government attempt to circumnavigate a legal deadline of 2027 and the natural state – which is a completely meaningless idea – with the idea that these rivers can’t achieve good ecological status, which they can.
“Even though it’s running through the centre of the city, there’s no reason to stop it from having a wide abundance of fish and flora and fauna, bugs and weeds can be a healthy ecosystem.”
And
Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, said: “No one is calling for the dismantling of towns and cities but we are demanding an end to the grotesque pollution entering our lakes, rivers and seas.
“Attempts to continue business as usual, allowing polluters to poison rivers and stripping back environmental protections, would be a disaster for nature and future generations.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell: the Tories have reversed the progress on water quality by allowing the privatised water firms to flood our waterways with sewage in the name of financial profit.
The solution isn’t hard. We don’t have to turn the clock back to 1840 – just to before the privatisation of the UK’s water providers.
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