Security Considerations

If Rachel Reeves wanted to find "non-priority spending" to cut so as to meet her arbitrary target of five per cent, then she should rule out bailing out Thames Water to the tune of three billion pounds, since it was seeking to increase its consumer bills by 59 per cent, and had increased its pollution incidents by 40 per cent in the six months to 30 September, yet paid its executives £770,000 in bonuses, including £195,000 to the CEO for his first three months. Bonuses for what?

Three billion now, and how much next time, and the time after that? Renationalise. Without compensation? I am hesitant, but how much would the shares fetch on the open market? Only a month ago, Thames Water had to secure the approval of its Class A bondholders, the likes of Silver Point and Elliott Partners, for an emergency loan of three billion pounds, despite having paid a dividend of £158 million only in July. A week ago, those bondholders failed to secure a veto over whether that loan would be used to settle the hundreds of millions of pounds in regulatory fines that were due in the next year.

If, as indubitably applies to the water companies, something would have to be nationalised rather than ever be allowed to go bust, then it does not belong in the private sector. Most of the world accepts that axiomatically. England is one of only two countries with privatised water. At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies pay out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt.

So we are all expected to bail it out, at whatever rate happened to be demanded by the shareholders, themselves largely foreign states as such, which are allowed to own our vital infrastructure but not two small circulation newspapers and a tiny circulation magazine. They should be told to forget it. Those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that? More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments.

Not that that will happen, of course. Who is to push for it? The Anti-Corruption Champion, Margaret Hodge? She chaired the Public Accounts Committee when her family firm, in which she was and is a major shareholder, was found to be paying only 0.01 per cent tax on £2.1 billion of business generated in the United Kingdom. "As long as they pay their taxes" was added to being "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" even by Peter Mandelson.

23 years ago, Mandelson was saying this about Bashar al-Assad. The criticism was in Tribune. But today, the third Government in which Mandelson has been the de facto Deputy Prime Minister is cheering on the fall of Syria to Al-Qaeda, to the point of offering to remove it from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations provided that it employed a stage name, because it was letting Israel have as much as it could grab of Syria on security grounds as specious as the claim, which is being repeated as fact by both of Britain's state broadcasters, that Benjamin Netanyahu had played only an "unwitting" role in bringing to power Abu Mohammad al-Julani and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham. Would Keir Starmer or Pat McFadden accept "security" as a reason for Russia to hold parts of Ukraine? They may very soon have to, but even so. David Lammy, on the other hand, thinks that Libya is next door to Syria, so no one would be cruel enough to ask him the question.

Bezalel Smotrich wants all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, but he and al-Julani can pursue their shared interest in burning churches. Sometime between AD37 and AD40, when the newly converted Saint Paul made it to Damascus, then he found the Church already there. Well, of course he did. He had been going there in order to persecute Her. The Street Called Straight is still there. As is the Church. For now. Sharia has been declared in Aleppo. Christian women in Damascus are being stopped at checkpoints and told not to leave home without male guardians. An American woman interviewing al-Julani for CNN has been ordered to wear a headscarf. And all the worst people in the West are as cock-a-hoop as they were despondent when Donald Trump won.