Over the past three years, the privatised water companies have used schemes based on debt tax relief in order to avoid nearly one billion pounds of tax liability.
Thames Water is owned by the Australian bank Macquarie, and it is now demanding that the British taxpayer hand over four billion pounds for a new "super-sewer". Yet it has drained off huge profits and imposed rapidly rising prices. They all have.
Thames Water is owned by the Australian bank Macquarie, and it is now demanding that the British taxpayer hand over four billion pounds for a new "super-sewer". Yet it has drained off huge profits and imposed rapidly rising prices. They all have.
What were once our water companies are now two thirds foreign-owned, and
they are subject neither to government regulation nor to market restraint.
Public ownership, people. Public ownership.
Then, among other things, we could have the National Grid for water that was
first proposed in the 1970s, and which Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens now
favour. The latter implicitly, and the former explicitly, now favour
renationalisation.
Wow, if even Heffer can be brought onside then anything is possible.
ReplyDeleteHe is in favour of the National Grid for water.
ReplyDeleteThere is only one way in which that can happen, by reversing the reason why it never did.
He is not quite there yet. Yet.
Hitchens is, though.
Heffer is still a Thatcherite, though.
ReplyDeleteHitchens never was-as anyone who read his 1999 book always knew.
His brother said, upon reviewing it "Peter understands that, for a true reactionary, Thatcherism is the problem".
Christopher admitted he would have voted for her in 1979.