Tag Archives: nationalisation

Connections: here’s why privatised water wants LABOUR to help it avoid nationalisation

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?

This Writer wasn’t.

Here‘s the dope:

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:

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:

Let’s pause for a moment to remind ourselves of why the privatised water firms are facing possible renationalisation. First, the pollution:

Now the profit-driven debt. Here’s The Guardian:

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:

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:

“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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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?

Starmer’s refusal to support strikes shows his blind ambition [VIDEO]

Promises broken: Jeremy Vine also pressed Keir Starmer on his reasons for abandoning the 10 pledges on which he was elected Labour leader.

Here’s a balancing view to set against This Site’s earlier article about Keir Starmer’s plan to tackle the cost of living crisis.

In the same Jeremy Vine interview when he discussed that plan, Starmer refused to support strike action by the TSSA (Transport Salaried Staff Association) union, saying he had to focus on his own ambition to be prime minister.

This Site’s friend Cornish Damo has this to say about it:

He’s got a good point, hasn’t he?

Starmer also discussed with Vine his u-turn on plans to renationalise the privatised energy firms; apparently the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything and now he can’t justify it.

Damo says this is nonsense and – from the arguments This Writer has heard over the last few years – he’s the one making sense:

It’s all worth thinking about, when you’re weighing up whether a Starmer-led Labour Party deserves your support at the ballot box.

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Energy firms: Miliband sells Labour’s soul so asset-strippers profit from privatisation

Power and pollution: Ed Miliband wants government to take over failing energy firms, restore them to health at huge cost to the public purse, and then sell them back so the 1% can rip us all off again. Why should we, when they have done so little (for example) to tackle climate change?

Read Natalie’s response to Ed Miliband’s industrial-disaster interview with Andrew Marr, then watch the clip. Then read her response again.

She’s right, isn’t she?

Miliband was saying that Labour would take struggling private energy companies back into public ownership – that’s nationalisation, for those of you who are too young to remember when we had industries owned by the government. That’s fine.

He was saying Labour would then use public money – your money – to restore those concerns and improve them. That’s fine too.

And then he ruined it by saying Labour would then re-privatise them so profit-grubbing shareholders could once again suck out all the cash they could while failing to invest in the system or the service, knowing they can always rely on the government to bail them out in the future.

That is no way to run a country.

Energy privatisation has failed.

The owners of the privatised companies – one-third of whom are foreign governments – are charging us the Earth (literally, when you consider the climate change implications) for very little, and when they get into trouble they are handing the mess back to us to sort out.

That is not good business and there is no way any self-respecting government – of any colour – would accept it.

There’s certainly no reason any voter should put up with it.

Miliband has hammered another nail into the coffin of StarmerLabour’s election hopes.

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Starmer lies again: what did he mean by ‘public ownership’ if not nationalisation?

Liar: Keir Starmer backpedalled wildly on his leadership election promise to bring the privatised utility companies back into public ownership, when Andrew Marr challenged him in a TV interview.

Andrew Marr was quite right to call out Keir Starmer on his big nationalisation lie.

Back when he was seeking election to the Labour leadership, Starmer made 10 pledges. One of them was this:

We all took this to be a ‘continuity’ pledge for the renationalisation of the big utilities that we all use – as defined under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

But today (September 26) in an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Starmer as-good-as admitted that this pledge was a lie.

Confronted with his original pledge, he said: “I don’t see nationalisation there.”

He went on to say: “Where common ownership is value for money for the taxpayer, then I am in favour of common ownership.”

Okay – what about gas, then? Gas prices are skyrocketing and the privatised firms are passing the shock on to consumers. If those companies were nationalised, then there would be no need for massive price rises as they could be rationalised into the future. Value for the taxpayer, right?

Starmer wouldn’t answer when Marr challenged him on this.

Of course, he had painted himself into a corner. His silly schoolboy essay had promised business leaders more privatisation and he couldn’t go back on that because he wants to be seen to be a “safe pair of hands” to take over Establishment interests when Boris Johnson’s Tories are no longer any good to the parasites.

It must be a real let-down for Ed Miliband, who was still claiming that fake, Starmer, Labour supports public ownership to the hilt on Newsnight last week:

In the light of Starmer’s lie, will Miliband turn himself into a liar?

Or will he agree that Starmer has betrayed a key pledge to party members – and to the nation?

For the rest of us, there should be no surprise at the fact that Starmer was lying when he said he would bring all those utilities back into public ownership.

All his other leadership pledges were lies, too.

And that raises an important point: Starmer was elected Labour leader on the basis of 10 pledges – promises to take particular actions as party leader. And he has since rejected all of them.

Doesn’t this indicate that he was elected on the basis of a tissue of lies?

If so, then shouldn’t he resign on the basis that he cannot be trusted, and another leadership election be called?

Source: Marr calls out Starmer on breaking renationalisation pledge – his excuse is unbelievable (video) – SKWAWKBOX

Why are we even discussing this? the CBI really IS scaremongering over Labour’s nationalisation plans

The Confederation of British Industry has started its usual pre-election campaign against the Labour Party – with the usual nonsense claims about Labour nationalisation policies.

It seems we are being asked to believe that bringing national utilities, the railways and the Royal Mail back into public ownership will cost the Treasury £196 billion, with no concurrent benefits to the economy.

I have to agree with Labour on this; it is nothing but scaremongering – and not very clever scaremongering, at that.

For a start, most of the utilities and railway firms Labour wants to take back into public ownership are currently owned by foreign firms – many of them owned by foreign governments.

That’s a lot of UK citizens’ money going abroad, right there. Bringing those firms back into public ownership would bring huge amounts of money back into the UK economy, instead of subsidising services in other lands.

We have been led to believe that Vince Cable sold our Royal Mail to hedge funds. Who knows where they’re putting the profits? That cash certainly doesn’t seem to be going back into the business. A tax haven, perhaps?

If so, then bringing the Royal Mail back into public ownership not only safeguards our postal service but brings huge amounts of money back into the UK economy.

That’s just off the top of my head.

The CBI admits its analysis is flawed, in that it only concentrates on the costs of any renationalisation, and explicitly does not consider any benefits.

The claims of this organisation have no value at all.

Source: Labour plans to renationalise utilities, railways and Royal Mail would cost £196bn, CBI claims | The Independent

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Will #Brexit scupper the Tories’ NHS privatisation plan?

This is interesting, from Eoin Clarke’s Facebook page:

“Page 98 of the Tory NHS Act 2012 makes NHS Privatisation possible because it opens up the NHS to EU Competition Law. This means that when the NHS tenders a contract it is legally obliged to invite bids from the private sector.

“Reversing this was always going to be very difficult for a Labour government. £40 billion of NHS contracts have been handed to the private sector and some of them for up to 15 years.

“Now that Britain is leaving the EU, it is much easier to stop this.

“Overnight, the NHS Act becomes null and void.

“There is no need for the NHS to comply with EU Competition Law. It would require another Act to enshrine UK Competition Law into the NHS.

“Also, it becomes much easier for a subsequent Labour government to reverse NHS privatisation. We would no longer be in breach of EU Competition Law.

“The same is true of renationalising the railways now.”

It occurs to me that the plan to enshrine all EU law onto the UK statute books, and then simply dispose of whatever the Conservatives don’t like, may create an obstacle to Dr Clarke’s suggestion.

But I think the point is that it is much easier to change UK law – as a Labour government could, once it comes into office – than EU law.

Your thoughts?

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Guardian seems happy to carry on Corbyn-bashing. Why?

Look how hard-left he is! He's wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the one's who look silly.

Look how hard-left he is! He’s wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the ones who look silly.

Wasn’t The Guardian forced to analyse its own coverage, only a few days ago, amid complaints that it was overly critical of Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn?

The verdict was that some articles had taken an overly-‘anti’ tone – but they’re still coming. Today’s Observer (the Graun‘s Sunday sister) has three in a row.

Yvette Cooper: ‘You can be strong without being extreme’ begins with the tagline, “The Labour leadership candidate says she understands the frustration and anger of Corbyn supporters but warns against losing the wider electorate.”

It continues: “The wholly unexpected obstacle to Cooper’s ambition to be Labour’s first female leader is the hard-left Jeremy ‘Jez We Can’ Corbyn.”

So Jeremy Corbyn is “extreme”, is he? He’s “hard-left”? When was that decided?

Most rational thinkers in the UK now accept that Corbyn is absolutely not “extreme” or “hard-left”. He’s left-wing in the classical Labour mould, in line with most of Labour’s loyal membership. If labels like “extreme”, or “hard” are to be applied anywhere, they would more properly belong with fellow candidates Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and especially Liz Kendall, whose attitudes – in Labour terms – would be described most accurately as “hard-right“.

Here’s another article – no headline this time, just straight into the aggro: “With Labour fixated by Corbyn, the Tories have taken advantage of a feeble opposition. Here’s how they did it…”

The text itself makes no mention of Corbyn – he’s just a handy peg on which the sub-editors have hung a headline. The author, Daniel Boffey, accepts that Labour could not be at full strength while the future leader is unnamed and shadow cabinet members have no idea whether they are likely to remain in their posts.

Finally, we have Jeremy Corbyn suggests he would bring back Labour’s nationalising clause IV. Apparently we are supposed to think this is a bad thing but the text of the article betrays the headline once again.

“I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring clause IV as it was originally written or it’s a different one,” is what Corbyn actually said.

He’s telling the country that, as Labour leader, he would listen to the wishes of his supporters and work to give them what they want.

That’s better than Burnham, Cooper and Kendall rolled together – and much more than the likes of David Cameron, Boris Johnson or George Osborne would ever willingly provide (although we know that their offers aren’t worth the air used to speak them or the paper on which they are written).

This Blog is happy to support Jeremy Corbyn – if only for one simple reason:

He is the only Labour leadership candidate to have shown any support for the Early Day Motion calling for the Conservative Government to publish statistics on the deaths of Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance claimants (EDM 285).

In fact, he co-sponsored it.

It was signed by 93 other MPs in the week or so between its creation and the day Parliament went into recess for the summer. I’ve been reminded that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall cannot sign EDMs because they are members of the shadow cabinet and are barred from doing so. Why haven’t they spoken in favour of it, then? How many of their supporters have signed it?

What does that say about those other leadership candidates?

Does it not tell us that they are happy to collude with the Conservatives in keeping the casualties hidden?

And here’s another good question:

Why aren’t newspapers like The Guardian asking Burnham, Cooper and Kendall about that, rather than stirring up non-existent muck about Corbyn?

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Lend Corbyn your nomination, Labour MPs – let’s have a REAL debate

Five-time Parliamentary 'Beard of the Year' - the likeable Jeremy Corbyn.

Five-time Parliamentary ‘Beard of the Year’ – the likeable Jeremy Corbyn.

If any of you have been struggling to work out whether you know anything at all about Jeremy Corbyn, you are not alone!

This Writer has also been at something of a loss with regard to his personality and achievements.

So let’s all be grateful to Owen Jones, who knows Mr Corbyn well, for scribbling a few details into his latest Guardian comment piece.

According to Owen, Mr Corbyn is:

  • The very antithesis of the negative caricature of an MP: he’s defined by his principles and beliefs, uninterested in personal self-advancement, and determined to use his platform to further the interests of people and causes that are otherwise ignored.
  • One of the most likable MPs – and a five-time winner of Parliamentary Beard of the Year.
  • A proponent of peace, a staunch internationalist (he was protesting against Saddam Hussein when the west was arming him), a fervent believer in workers’ rights, and an opponent of austerity whoever peddles it

Not only does he seem exactly what we’re looking for, he even seems to fit what people in this nation genuinely want, as Owen explains:

“According to the polls, millions of Britons support a living wage, a radical house building programme, public ownership of utilities and services and higher taxes on the rich… Given their widespread backing, these policies surely at least need a hearing in the leadership contest of the dominant, purportedly left-of-centre party in Britain.”

In conclusion, this blog can only echo the article’s final words:

“If Labour MPs deny the party and the country a genuine debate, it will reflect disastrously on them. It will do whoever emerges victorious no good, either. Labour has just suffered one of the worst defeats in its history. If the party doesn’t have the good sense to have a meaningful debate now, you might wonder why it doesn’t just pack up. So come on, Labour MPs. Put your future careers aside for party and national interest.

“Lend Corbyn a nomination, and let a real debate begin.”

Hear, hear.

Labour MPs call for change in party policy – LabourList

Off the rails: Should railway companies be renationalised in the national interest?

Off the rails: Should railway companies be renationalised in the national interest?

A group of 15 Labour MPs have issued a public statement this morning, expressing concern about elements of Labour’s policy agenda, and urging a change of course in three key areas, according to LabourList.

The letter – signed by MPs on the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party – calls for an alternative to Labour’s current deficit reduction plans, public ownership of the railways and a return to collective bargaining and employment rights in the workplace.

Here’s the statement in full, which outlines the signatories preferred alternative approach:

1 An alternative to the continuation of austerity and spending cuts till 2019-20

All three main parties, tragically, seem to agree that deep spending cuts must continue to be made until the structural budget deficit is wiped out in 2019-20, even though wages have already fallen 8% in real terms, business investment is still below pre-crash levels, unemployment is still 2million, the trade deficit in manufactured goods at over £100bn is now the largest in modern history, and household debt is now over £2trillion and still rising.

The Tories want to continue with these cuts because it gives them political cover to achieve their real objective which is to shrink the State and squeeze the public sector back to where it was in the 1930s.

It isn’t even as though the deficit is being reduced by these savage cuts. Because the reduction in the government’s tax revenues as a result of shrinking incomes exceed the spending cuts, the deficit (which is still nearly £100bn) is likely to rise, not fall, in 2014-15 and in future years.

There is an alternative way out of endless austerity. We need public investment to kickstart the economy out of faltering growth and to generate real job creation and rising incomes.

It can readily be funded. With interest rates at 0.5%, a £30bn investment package can be financed for just £150m a year, enough to create more than a million real jobs within 2-3 years. And even without any increase in public borrowing at all, the same sum could equally be funded either through the two banks which are already in public ownership, or through printing money (quantitative easing) to be used directly for industrial investment rather than for bond-buying by the banks as hitherto, or through taxing the ultra-rich by a special levy.

2 Returning rail franchises when expired to public ownership rather than subjecting them to competition

The essence of rail reform must be to reverse fragmentation, to reintegrate the system under public ownership, and to run it in the public interest. At present Britain has the highest fares in Europe. The additional costs of privatisation to public funds are estimated at more than £11bn, or around £1.2bn a year, so that the costs to the taxpayer are now three times as much as under British Rail.

Since 2010 rail fares have increased 25%, yet at the same time more than £200m a year has been paid out in dividends to shareholders or overseas state-owned rail companies which now hold two-thirds of the current rail franchises. Over 80% of the public want the railways re-nationalised, which must include a significant proportion of Tories.

The most obvious and simplest way to achieve this is by letting the rail franchises expire and then taking them back into public ownership at no cost whatever to the taxpayer. To subject them to a public bidding competition with private bidders is not only wholly unnecessary but sends out the wrong signals, as though we’re not confident of our own ideology. The Tories certainly didn’t offer a competitive option when they forced through privatisation!

Anyway, the franchise process, so far from being economic, encourages the gaming of wildly optimistic passenger number projections and this, combined with huge legal contract complexity which is bureaucratic and wasteful both in time and money (except for the lawyers and accountants), has led in the past to franchise failures and operating chaos, most notably on the East and West Coast lines. From past experience public ownership has consistently worked better, and we should not gratuitously throw obstacles in our own path in getting there.

3 The need for the restoration of collective bargaining and employment rights as a check against excessive corporate power

When the Thatcher government came to office in 1979, 82% of workers in the UK had their main terms and conditions determined by a union-negotiated collective agreement. The latest figures now show that the coverage is down to just 23%. One very significant result is that the share of national income going to salaries and wages has fallen dramatically from 65% in 1980 to 53% in 2012 – a loss to employees of some £180bn!

This has happened partly from the collapse in trade union membership from 55% of the workforce in 1979 to 23% in 2012. But it has also happened partly as a result of the anti-trade union laws introduced in the 1980-90s and partly because the state has withdrawn support for collective bargaining as part of the free market ideology of de-regulation of all markets, including the labour market. It is somewhat ironic however that de-regulation of the labour market requires the tightest regulation of one of the key players in that market, the trade union movement.

An incoming Labour government should choose to enhance the role of trade unions because trade union rights are human rights, a trade union presence creates more just and equal workplaces, and trade union collective bargaining is more redistributive than statutory wage setting and will assist on the road from austerity. We should therefore actively promote sectoral collective bargaining and strengthen the rights of trade unions to recognition, and of their members to representation.

Diane Abbott
Dave Anderson
Katy Clark
Jeremy Corbyn
Fabian Hamilton
Kelvin Hopkins
Ian Lavery
John McDonnell
Michael Meacher
Ian Mearns
Grahame Morris
Linda Riordan
Steve Rotherham
Jim Sheridan
Chris Williamson

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