We Should Be The Class A Bondholders

Three weeks 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. Today, 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.

Likewise, Great British Energy will do nothing more than hand over £8.3 billion of public money to the same old rip-off energy companies, merely bribing them to go Green, after which they will be able to charge whatever they liked, effectively for us to use the Sun and the wind. Yet it is the Conservatives who have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream.

Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began. My favourite question of Greens is, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” It always stops them in their tracks. And I have the same question for post-Thatcherite culture warriors and opponents of Net Zero, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” If not, then I can give you chapter and verse as to why you did not really regret the loss of any of things that you claim to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At local elections in England, Green gains, often considerable, are largely from the Conservatives. At the General Election, the Greens gained twice as many seats from the Conservatives as from Labour.

Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council.

Theresa May gave the nation the Climate Change Act, and her erstwhile Chief of Staff, Nick Timothy, has just taken over Matt Hancock’s seat. Boris Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the British coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for donkey’s years.

Instead of this, let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. This. Not to spend five years giving £8.3 billion to the same energy companies, either private or owned by foreign states, that had been ripping us all off for decades. It is excellent news that Hartlepool and three other nuclear power stations are to remain open, but they ought not to be owned by EDF, nor should they close when Hinkley Point opened.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Say it again, harness the power of the State to bathe this country in heat and light from oil, gas, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, solar, and that without which there could also be no steel for rigs, pipelines, power stations or turbines, namely coal. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the defeat of the miners in 1985. Do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

And not only the miners. The Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act will leave Abellio East Midlands Limited with a contract that did not end until October 2030,  XC Trains Limited with a contract that did not end until 12 October 2031, and First Trenitalia West Coast Limited with a contract that did not end until 17 October 2032. Who knows who will be in government by then? Moreover, the rolling stock will remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Where is that money going? To whom? See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Bibby Stockholm, the Rwanda Scheme, the arms companies, and everything else that is very good at kicking back to politicians while employing retired top brass.

Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be instead an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.