Tapp, Water

Shabana Mahmood has asked Keir Starmer to sack Mike Tapp because he had been taking ideas on which she had been working, and briefing them as his own in the hope of a job under Andy Burnham. Country First. The grownups are back in charge. It’s nice, isn’t it, the quiet?

Well, they have to fill up their time somehow. While betting the farm on solar energy, they cannot cope with the Sun in summer. There are restrictions on water use despite a spring that would have given Noah a run for his money, something that, like flaming June, is seasonal in itself even if there are degrees of it. Any water shortage in Britain would be downright laughable, except that it is not funny in the least.

Apart from Chile, where it was bequeathed by General Pinochet, only England in the whole wide world has privatised water, the failure of which is total. Lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

Yet who is to make this case? Kemi Badenoch? Rupert Lowe? Nigel Farage, whom Badenoch calls a Corbynite as if that were still an insult? Yesterday, Farage admitted that he had not spent any of Christopher Harborne’s five million pounds on “lifelong security”, nor apparently on anything else. But no one is given five million pounds for nothing. This is not going to go away. It is our business if it was less than a year before he entered Parliament, which it was. Those are the written rules. It is our business if he wants to be Prime Minister, which he does. Those are the unwritten rules. And if, while advocating very hard for cryptocurrencies, Farage did not use any of that money to invest in Kwasi Kwarteng’s cryptocurrency company, then what did he use?