Clear Water

The same part of the Labour Party is bending Andy Burnham's ear, both to turn England's water companies into not-for-profit co-operatives, and to give the United Kingdom a written Constitution.

On water, that is already the model in Wales, where there is a drought. It would transfer corporate debt to co-ops that would borrow for investment at commercial rates. The answer is public ownership, as in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, and indeed in every other country apart from Chile, where privatisation was bequeathed by General Pinochet.

More than 70 per cent of our water supply is owned in, and not uncommonly by, foreign states that themselves have water owned by the State. So no new desalination plant since 2010, no new reservoir since as long ago as 1992, no National Grid for water, and the impossibility of the Government's signature housebuilding programme because the areas in question were the ones with water shortages.

When the water companies were privatised, then they were debt free, since they were, and would remain, the necessarily monopoly suppliers of an absolutely indispensable commodity of which the raw material fell out of the sky for free. They are now claiming that they would be unable to invest in infrastructure if they were renationalised, since they would be competing for funding against education, defence, the NHS, and so on. But that is a lie. Over the next five years, they will spend £91 billion. Of that, £90 billion will come from the bill payers, not from the shareholders. So why are there shareholders? What are they for?

There are grey areas, but 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. It is therefore perfectly clear where water belongs. There should be no bailout of the water companies. If there must be compensation for this renationalisation (as there must be ordinarily, but there is nothing ordinary about this), then the money should be spent on that. As much as the shares would fetch on the open market, and not a penny more.

At most, and as would therefore also apply to other renationalisations, there might be a case-by-case assessment of individual interests. Pension funds? We really would see what we could do. Private equity? We would need an awful lot more persuasion. Transnational corporations? We would be pleased to show you out. Sovereign wealth funds, being foreign states as such? You could show yourselves out.

Had Britain been given a written Constitution by nineteenth-century Liberals, or by Interwar Conservatives, or by Margaret Thatcher, or by Tony Blair, and at least the first and last of those seriously considered it, then such measures would have been impossible. As would the domestic programme of the Attlee Government, which, although it wobbled a bit by signing up to NATO, otherwise fiercely guarded the absolute sovereignty of the House of Commons against Conservative and Liberal enthusiasm for what was always intended to become the European Union, in which all of the above would be illegal just as Buy British and the abolition of VAT on electricity would be, and for the British Conservative-written European Convention on Human Rights, with which all of the above would be ruled incompatible. Think on.