Utility

Who could possibly want "more freedom to choose your water supplier"? I don't know about you, but my water supplier is the sky, which sends it down for free, and in no ungenerous quantities of late.

Even Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens are now calling for the National Grid for water that, like a Norwegian-style investment fund for North Sea Oil, would have happened if it had not been for the 1979 General Election. Heffer does not yet openly acknowledge, although Hitchens does, that the only way to such a Grid is public ownership.

The Energy Bill will send gas and electricity prices up by two hundred pounds per annum. Like our water, and like other essential services such as our railways, our energy is increasingly owned, not merely by foreign companies, but by foreign states. The Coalition wants the sovereign wealth funds of those flush with oil revenue to buy up our roads and to charge us tolls for using them.

So much for Tory patriotism. Including Tory realism in our dealings with foreign states. When the Islamists take over in the petro-states, as they have already done due to our own stupid action in Libya, then they will own our roads as well as the fuel needed to drive on them.

We need publicly owned coal mines and publicly owned nuclear power stations to provide publicly owned electricity that might be too cheap to need to be metered, and which would certainly power publicly owned trains free at the point of use and once again stretching to every corner of the Kingdom as the bone structure and the nervous system of our transport infrastructure.

And we need a publicly owned water supply, likewise inexpensive to the consumer, and organised as a National Grid.

Ed Miliband, over to you.