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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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And the pollution that gives rise to such disease is still taking place, despite the penalties that are being applied to the private water companies responsible:
"South West Water fined £2.1m for pollution offences."
That is the 161st time @SouthWestWaterhas been fined over the last 10 years, a total of £4,573,634. Fines don't work, something else needs to done.@NickFerrariLBC was right, time for jail.https://t.co/rRBFrsTN7s
He reckons regulation needs to be properly applied to the private water companies – but this misses the point: it is.
The problem is that the companies’ bosses have realised that it is cheaper to keep polluting and pay the fines than it is to implement system improvements that will allow the full processing of sewage and thereby the purification of our waterways.
They have also realised that the government is unlikely to increase those fines to such a degree that it would be wiser to carry out the work. Either the privatised companies would simply pass on the cost to their customers, or they would dare the government to put them out of business – because what would happen then?
Water companies are monopolies, whether the government admits it or not – operating on a geographical basis. And no matter what happens, someone has to provide the service.
So these businesspeople have us all over a barrel.
The only other alternative is for the government to pay for improvements with public money. But part of the point of privatisation was for improvements and modernisation to be funded from private investment.
So we come to the only logical solution: re-nationalisation.
And the problem with that is, nobody in charge of either of the UK’s two main parties wants to bring water back under public control.
It isn’t too expensive – governments can create the money to pay off the executives and shareholders. There’s no inflationary pressure either, if the government doing it taxes the cost back from, say, the rich (who took £700 billion for nothing during the pandemic, remember).
But, again, nobody in charge of the UK’s two main parties wants that cash back.
That’s all it is – a matter of will.
We simply need to put somebody in government who is willing to do what is needed.
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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:
The right created the problem.
The left has the solution.
Centrists say the solution is "too expensive" so we just have to put up with the problem.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) May 12, 2023
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:
Labours Thangam Debbonaire says the next Labour govt won't take our failed privatised water industry into public ownership because of the cost. Why not issue bonds?
But then of course, cost is simply an excuse to mask the Labour rights ideological oposition to public ownership. pic.twitter.com/7eZq0HP4E7
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:
Labour are frankly shit
"we can't nationalise because of the cost"
meanwhile, many want services nationalised Because they're getting poorer, the services are shit or spewing out shite & making large profits
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:
— Robert Bob…. What is this nightmare? (@MrRobertBob1) May 11, 2023
"Sewage flooding Cambs street for third day 'going straight into the river'."
Meet @Anglianwater the same AW that just 2 weeks ago was fined £2.6 for illegally dumping sewage, the 5th such fine in 2 years. £4.328m in fines in the 2 years alone. That AW?https://t.co/AxWPT01R8a
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.
Flushed out: the Tories have not only agreed to carry out impact assessments on the effects of dumping raw sewage into UK waterways, but they must also set targets for such dumping to be reduced, and introduce fines against privatised water companies that fail to do so, or fail to properly monitor such discharges.
Don’t be discouraged by the Tory carping; this is a victory for anyone who is concerned about raw sewage being dumped into UK waterways.
Labour used an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons to put forward a motion calling on the government to
Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges
The motion also included a provision that would have given the Opposition the ability to take control of the Commons order paper in future and introduce legislation of its own.
Now, why would it do that? It doesn’t have any specific relevance to the sewage issue, as far as This Writer can see.
The Conservatives leaped on what they saw as an opportunity to humiliate Labour, with an amendment that removed the fourth part of the motion but supported the first three.
Because the amendment only deleted words from the motion, Parliamentary procedure meant it would be the first aspect on which MPs would vote – and the Tories’ Parliamentary majority meant it was passed by 290 votes to 188 against.
They then forced a vote on the amended motion. Labour MPs were ordered to abstain on it, because the Tories had amended it in their favour.
Had they, though? Had they really? It still demanded all the measures on sewage that Labour wanted.
And I don’t think anybody in the Labour leadership believed the Tories would allow them to introduce their own legislation.
The amended motion passed with 286 Tory votes – so the Tories pushed through the changes that Labour had demanded.
That means that the Tories are now obliged to
Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges
that they weren’t willing to do before.
And they’re saying they humiliated Labour?
Well, here’s a thing:
Those of us who are concerned about water pollution don’t care.
The changes have been supported – by the Tories who originally opposed them.
So who has been humiliated, really?
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Water: people supported the privatisation because they were told private enterprise would invest in system improvements while making bills cheaper. How much more gullible could they have been?
Here’s a double-whammy:
Most people believe that jail sentences are a fitting punishment for water bosses when their companies are responsible for major pollution spills in our rivers, waterways and shores. The strength of public feeling is revealed by an exclusive YouGov poll commissioned by Good Law Project.
The polling of 2,112 people across Great Britain has revealed that:
60% of respondents believe that the chief executives of water companies should receive prison sentences if they are found to be responsible for serious incidents of water pollution. Only 21% disagree.
82% have heard something about sewage discharges from media coverage about the issue.
53% blame the water companies for sewage discharges into our rivers and seas.
People have had enough. This disgraceful situation needs to be brought to an end urgently.
It follows – doesn’t it? – that the privatisation of the UK’s water supply has been nothing but a horrifying failure and an ecological disaster.
And how do the water firms respond to calls for them to act?
Water firms are making ‘a mockery’ of efforts to link executive pay to environmental performance by refusing to measure how much raw sewage is spewing into rivers and seas, experts say.
Industry regulator Ofwat wants private water companies to align bosses’ bonuses to pollution targets.
But companies do not monitor the amount of sewage being dumped into waterways.
Instead, they collect data on when the spills occur and how long they last.
Campaigners say weak regulators and budget cuts have allowed water companies to get away with a decades-long lack of investment in the Victorian-era sewage network.
And while firms monitor when spills happen and how long they last as part of a range of performance indicators used to set executive bonuses, none of the water companies contacted by the Mail said they monitored the amount of sewage being dumped into waterways.
Bonuses can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
United Utilities, the monopoly water supplier to 7m customers in north-west England … was responsible for 40 per cent of all spills last year.
Its chief executive Steven Mogford received a £727,000 bonus last year as part of his £3.2million pay packet.
United has a £230 million investment at 15 of its 575 treatment work sites to reduce spillages ‘by more than 10m tons a year – the equivalent of 4,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’, a spokesman for the firm said.
If United has a reliable model to measure volume then, as an environmental campaigner asked in the article,
“Why not share it with the public and the wider industry?”
And what of the regulator?
Ofwat confirmed that so-called ‘event duration monitors’ that companies are installing only measure the number of spills and their duration, not volume.
It has also drawn up plans to block dividend payments – which have totalled an estimated £66billion since privatisation three decades ago – telling boards to ‘take account’ of environmental and customer performance when deciding payouts.
But it has only fined only one company – Southern Water – since sewage spill rules were introduced in 1994.
So: a toothless regulator means privatised, profit-driven water firms have no incentive to invest in improvements to their archaic system, or to stop filling our waterways with untreated sewage.
And they’ll make us pay through the nose for this “service” so they can pay themselves a fortune each year.
Did you vote for this?
And, more to the point:
Would you vote for a political party that would put a stop to it?
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Therese Coffey (right): was this shot taken after she had a snifter of water from the creek outside her house? Let’s hope not…
Activists have renamed a river on Environment Secretary Therese Coffey’s doorstep “Sh*t Creek” after it was found to be riddled with e.coli.
She lives on Martlesham Creek, which feeds Suffolk’s River Deben, and which contains 50mg of e.coli per litre of water – five times the Government safe swimming level of 10mg.
In dangerously high volumes, the bug can cause an infection linked to kidney failure and prove fatal.
There’s more:
It has also emerged the Environment Agency found 894.13 nanograms of cancer-causing PFA chemicals per litre in a spring near Mrs Coffey’s Suffolk home.
Anything over 100ng per litre needs immediate action, according to the government’s Drinking Water Inspectorate.
Coffey has been accused of failing to stop the dumping of sewage into waterways, which happened 300,000 times last year.
So activists have put up a plaque stating: “Therese Coffey MP – voted to block a law requiring water companies to dump less raw sewage in our waterways and seas.”
So it seems the poem Pam Ayres wrote to commemorate the Tory government’s decision to allow the dumping of untreated sewage into rivers is entirely appropriate:
Now all the life is dying
And turning up its feet
Along the Sh*tcreek River
Where vapours ain’t so sweet
Where water ain’t so crystal clear
Where sewage oozes down
Along the Sh*tcreek River
As the banks turn brown!
In fairness:
Anglian Water is apparently working to assess water quality in the area and has pledged to make sure its operations are not responsible for poor river health.
It is working with swimming groups to support plans for inland bathing.
Well, let’s hope those plans come to fruition after the brook is cleaned up.
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Rivers of Sh*t: Boris Johnson couldn’t be bothered to think about the details of his Brexit, and now the UK is suffering shortages of materials including those used to clean sewage. So partially-cleaned and harmful crap is going directly into our rivers.
Thursday, February 23 was a bad day for Environment Secretary Therese Coffey.
Not only did she suggest that we all eat turnips as a replacement for vegetables (and tomatoes) that are currently running short in supermarkets – causing a shortage of turnips as well, but she tried to pass the stink over the pumping of sewage into the UK’s waterways off as Labour’s fault:
Jim McMahon – On a scale of 1 to 10… how does she rate her own government's record on ending the Tory sewage scandal?
Therese Coffey – It was the Labour government that failed to deal with the urban wastewater issues..
It’s possible that everything Coffey said about Labour was true – that party, in office, should have re-nationalised the water companies when it had the chance – but didn’t.
But the current issue, of raw sewage being pumped into rivers and the sea, is entirely of the current Tory government’s creation.
Coffey knows that – or should. It is pathetic that she should try to pull the wool over our eyes in such a blatant manner.
On a related matter:
Some of the highest PFAS concentrations ever recorded in environmental samples… these being present in our UK waters is of huge concern. @Feargal_Sharkey@friends_earth
Toxic substances from chemicals firm site found polluting protected river https://t.co/pV0Pm4n9bI
PFAS stands for perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, a family of thousands of human-made substances known as “forever chemicals” because they are extremely persistent and will not break down in the environment for thousands of years.
I suppose Coffey would blame this spread of toxic chemicals into a protected river, in 2023, on the Labour government of 1997-2010 as well?
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Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has refused to meet with people affected by the raw sewage the government is allowing to be pumped into the UK’s waterways and coastal waters.
She says she doesn’t need to; she’s aware of the situation because she represents a coastal constituency.
But what did other members of the Commons Environment committee think of her comments?
Here’s my audio-visual interpretation of how it might have gone…
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Sally-Ann Hart: covering her posterior during the sewage crisis?
Here’s another great analysis from Maximilien Robespierre – this time on the way Tories who were elected to Parliament in 2019 are trying to cover their rear ends after voting to allow water companies to pollute our rivers, seas and beaches:
So: she said she voted for an amendment to Labour’s motion, that demanded investment in the sewerage infrastructure that would end the discharge of raw sewage into the environment.
But the amendment was changed to remove a requirement for water companies (in England) to take every reasonable step to ensure untreated sewage is not released from storm overflows. Also removed was the requirement to show improvements in the sewerage systems.
So her claim that she voted to demand improvements seems to be untrue. But, like many of her fellows in the Tory 2019 Parliamentary intake, she’s trying to put people off voting to remove her from her seat by pretending to be on their side.
She says an “ambitious” plan will be unveiled on September 1, to clean up the system. Will it be as ambitious as the plan she has already supported – that allowed water companies to stink up our beaches with possibly disease-ridden crap?
This Writer agrees with Maximilien Robespierre: Ms Hart should have been challenged to take a swim in the water she voted to despoil – to prove she had defended it, or demonstrate conclusively that she had not.
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