Tag Archives: water

Is Environment Agency colluding with government to lie about bathing water quality?

The Environment Agency has been telling the government how to lie about the quality of bathing water, investigations have revealed.

Here’s Channel 4 News to explain:

According to Channel 4 News,

We’ve seen documents which show that almost twice as many English bathing waters would fail pollution tests – if the regulator [the Environment Agency] wasn’t legally allowed to disregard some of the worst results.

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Papers and emails show Government officials were also worried about negative press and wanted pollution incidents to be “better presented”. But the Environment Agency warned some options they gave could look like ‘greenwashing’.

The Government and the agency insist it’s perfectly above board and follows scientific best practice, but campaigners want the system to change, insisting public safety should come first.

Former musician, now clean water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has obtained a copy of the Environment Agency’s advice to the government, explaining how to – basically – lie to us about the amount of pollution in our waters:

In the TV report, an interviewee suggests that protection of the environment should be what the Environment Agency does, and not “spinning for the government”.

This Writer would certainly agree.

But it’s just another example of the corruption sweeping the UK.

It seems clear that the Environment Agency is not fit for purpose; when an organisation that is supposed to penalise water companies that break pollution rules is instead providing advice on how to hide such breaches, it does not deserve to continue.


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Water boss bonuses show privatisation is a gravy train for the greedy

Rivers of Shit: 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.

This is the second half of the privatisation scam.

Back on January 25, This Site explained how privatising governments like the Tories give themselves an excuse to sell national assets like water, electricity and railways into private hands.

They do this by de-funding the service to ensure that it cannot employ the right people, buy the right equipment and/or accommodate demand.

The aim is to make people angry at the public service, so they demand privatisation – or at least accept it when it is proposed.

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But what happens after a service is privatised?

This:

Water company bosses have received over £25m in bonuses and incentives since the last general election, according to analysis by Labour.

The analysis found that nine water chief executives were paid £10m in bonuses, £14m in incentives and £603,580 in benefits since 2019.

It comes amid outrage over illegal sewage dumping, with water firms in England seeking to hike customers’ bills by an extra £156 a year to invest in Britain’s Victorian infrastructure.

The blatant greed is staggering in the flagrancy of the insult to bill-payers.

Instead of using the money paid for the service to provide it, shareholders and executives take it for themselves and then (in the case of water firms, literally) flush that service down the drain.

And then they demand more money, under the pretence that they’ll use it to fix the problems they have created.

You’d have to be a fool to believe that one. So what do you think the Tories are planning to do?

And, come to think of it…

What do you think of the plan by both Tories and Labour to increase privatisation of the health service?

Source: Water bosses have received £25m in bonuses since last election, Labour says | Politics News | Sky News


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The UK supports public ownership of utilities. Why do none of our politicians agree?

Privatisation of public services and utilities has failed dismally. Why do both the Conservatives and the Labour Party under Keir Starmer support it?

Why are they determined to ram it down our throats?

We all know the problems with privatisation:

And we all know the tricks our politicians use to support privatisation:

So we all know that privatisation doesn’t work as a way of providing water, energy, healthcare, rail and bus services and the mail.

And when I say all of us, the polling is conclusive:

Here’s the problem:

At the next general election, neither of the main UK political parties are going to offer public ownership to the people.

You will not be allowed the chance to vote for it.

Don’t you think that’s, well… wrong?

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Your politicians should be seeking election on platforms that have public support, shouldn’t they?

They should have consulted with the electorate and they should be putting forward policies that we feel we can get behind – shouldn’t they?

Has any politician asked you if you support public ownership?

Have any of them asked if you support privatisation?

I’m guessing the answer is no.

Then, why on Earth would you vote for any of them? If they’re not offering what you want – and they very clearly aren’t – you need to find someone else.


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For clarity: lawyer Keir Starmer ignored that the siege of Gaza is now a war crime

Keir Starmer: if he can’t – or won’t – recognise a war crime when one is described to him, how long will it be before he’s committing them himself?

He said Israel’s actions against Gaza should conform to international law, sure.

But former Director of Public Prosecutions – and therefore a lawyer himself – Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to understand what international law requires in this instance.

It requires the protection of non-combatants, which means they must not be deprived of the necessities for survival – such as water.

So you can understand why Judy Hamilton, below, responded the way she did to Starmer’s comments in his interview with This Writer’s one-time sparring partner Nick Ferrari:

Let’s also have a reminder that the siege on Gaza, including the million children who constitute half of the population there, constitutes collective punishment and is an offence against the Geneva Convention:

As a potential world leader, Keir Starmer should be aware of international law – or at the very least, he should have been made aware of it before making himself look like a bloodthirsty potential war criminal.

Or is he aware of it, and he just doesn’t care? All things considered, this seems horrifyingly likely to This Writer.

ADDITIONAL: Now Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry has appeared on TV, refusing to answer whether she thinks Israel cutting off food, water and energy from Gaza is against international law:

She knows it is a war crime and she should have admitted it.

Shame on Victoria Derbyshire, as well (for a change), for not putting Thornberry straight.


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Is Israel committing war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza?

Remember when this happened? It wasn’t long ago:

Bad move.

It’s a Geneva Convention law: nobody may be punished for an offence they have not personally committed and collective punishment is prohibited, as are pillages and the taking of hostages.

So: international law demands that civilians must not be harmed (certainly not deliberately).

This may come as a surprise to the European Union! And, indeed to this King’s Counsel, Jeremy Brier, who doesn’t seem to know the law as well as he should.

Also to the UK’s Foreign Secretary, who went on the record to say that he backs these war crimes that are clear violations of the Geneva Convention:

Sadly I must question whether the claim of an atrocity in a kibbutz near Gaza is an attempt to throw attention away from this.

I’m going to leave the last word – this time – to someone who experienced collective punishment as a person of Japanese ethnicity living in the United States during World War II, and went on to perform in a TV phenomenon that envisioned people of all colours, creeds and cultures living together in peace:

So to the question in the headline.

Not all people in Gaza are members of Hamas, and should not be punished for what Hamas has done. That much is clear, especially considering the fact that fully half of the population – a million people – are children.

But the Israeli government has declared that it is attacking everybody in Gaza indiscriminately, describing the population as “human animals”.

Is Israel committing war crimes, then?


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‘Judge us by our record’, says Tory MP. We did – and the verdict is not good!

Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?

Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.

Here she is, saying it:

Peter Stefanovic took her at her word, and did just that. Here’s the result:

Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.

Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.

Crumbling schools and hospitals.

Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.

Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):

14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:


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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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Economists please note: high inflation may be A POLITICAL CHOICE

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 Macro piece, 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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Starmer SCRAPS (not ‘waters down’) his pledge to strengthen workers’ rights

Keir Starmer: if he bothered to do some work instead of lounging around listening to right-wing donors, he’d known that protecting workers’ rights means employers’ productivity and profitability improves. His claim that watering down those rights is pro-business is ridiculously silly.

Keir Starmer has really done it this time; he has scrapped the Labour Party’s reason for existence.

In case it hasn’t occurred to you, the “Labour” in that party’s title means it was created to represent working people and people who have to seek work in order to make a living.

Not very long ago, Starmer pledged (he loves to pledge) stronger rights for workers if his party were to form a government.

Now that pledge is as much a part of history as all the others he has made:

Let’s be clear on this: Starmer has gone on the record many times, stating that his word is his bond and if he makes a pledge, he’ll stick by it (the following clip discusses renationalisations of privatised national utilities and the scrapping of university tuition fees, which are both Starmer pledges that have since been consigned to history):

Saul Staniforth points out that Starmer’s supporters have excuses for his decisions to withdraw all the pledges he made when he became leader of what was still, then, the Labour Party. But Saul also clarifies that the same conditions are not relevant to the pledge on workers’ rights:

It seems clear from shadow minister Stephen Morgan’s interview response below that the pledge on workers’ rights is now history:

Here’s the at-a-glance guide to what Starmer has done:

Alternatively, follow the link below for a more in-depth examination:

Amazingly, Angela Rayner is still claiming that the policy is intact and the only difference is that, now, the way it will be implemented is being laid out:

But nobody is taking that seriously, including leading figures within the party:

Ultimately, last week’s announcement means just one thing to most people:

And finally: here’s Damo with exactly the kind of earthy commentary we should expect from him:

The punchline is that Starmer’s claim that scrapping this policy is pro-business… is childish nonsense.

Firms whose employees have strong rights and support are more successful than those whose workers don’t – because their job security instils loyalty, pride in their work and a genuine desire for the entire business to prosper. They are healthier in body and mind, and more productive.

Firms that treat their employees as they will be able to continue treating them under Starmer’s new policy… well, they go under. And then the bosses blame the workers they mistreated.

Starmer would know that if he had bothered to do any research.

Sadly, it seems he doesn’t know the meaning of work.


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