In more than a decade as an MP, I have attended hundreds of meetings in parliament. Most pass. Some linger. Few stay with you. But a recent event was very different.
We hosted the actors, the real-life people they portrayed and the production team behind the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business. It tells the story of campaigners and families who have spent years fighting not just privatised water companies, but a system that was meant to protect them – and has too often failed.
At its centre is a mother, Julie Maughan, whose story is one of the most difficult of the series. Some years ago, her eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died after exposure to polluted water. It’s the kind of thing that you read about from a distance and struggle to take in. You register it, and move on.
But there’s no distance when you are sitting a few feet away from Julie in a quiet committee room that suddenly feels very small. Or when you hear her sobbing as the room watches the TV clip of her daughter dying; her voice breaking as she speaks of the impact this unspeakable tragedy had on her and her family. It’s something I will not forget.
There was no performance, no grandstanding, no playing to the audience. Just grief, dignity and a quiet determination that no other family should go through what they had. At the end of the meeting, she came over to thank me for the work we have been doing to bring water back into public ownership. That moment cut through everything. Because statistics can be argued with. Stories like this cannot.
And so, in that instant, this stopped being about policy or process. It became something simpler: what kind of country allows this to happen? And what kind of country decides it will not allow it to happen again? These two questions define the scale of what this Labour government faces – and the standard by which a sceptical, exhausted electorate will judge it. People who have watched a political system promise and fail, promise and fail, until the promising itself becomes the insult.
It’s why I brought my private member’s bill on water ownership and why I have kept at it. Because the water industry doesn’t just expose a series of failures within one sector. It exposes something far larger and more damaging: the logic of a system that has run its course. A system that took our water, our housing, our energy networks, our care homes, our childcare – the things people cannot do without – and handed them to those whose obligation was never to us. That extracted profit from necessity. That made the most vulnerable corners of our lives into the most lucrative. That called this “efficiency” and told us the alternative was unthinkable. But it was never unthinkable. It was simply inconvenient – to those amassing vast fortunes at our collective expense.
For more than three decades, our water industry has operated on a model that allows private companies to extract profit from a basic necessity while the public carries the risk. Bills rise. Investment falls short. Pollution becomes routine. Regulators are co-opted into collusion. This is what campaigners have called the “privatisation premium”: the extra cost households pay not to run the service, but to sustain a system built around debt and shareholder returns. A transfer of wealth from public to private, designed into the system itself.
Water is simply the clearest example. And that is why it matters. Because if we cannot get something as fundamental as water right, what does that say about the rest of our economy?
We have lived through austerity, the disruption of Brexit, the shock of Covid. And now, as conflict in Iran drives a new energy price surge through the global economy, millions of households face another wave of pressure on their living standards – one that will not be abstract. It will show up in bills. In services that no longer function. In a growing, justified fury that the system is not on their side.
This is the moment that should concentrate every progressive mind in government and beyond. Because what is coming is not just an economic shock. It is a political test. Incumbent centre-left parties across the world are about to discover whether the economic framework they inherited – the one written 40 years ago, the one that said privatise, deregulate, trust the market with the essentials of life – has any road left to run. The honest answer is that it does not.
The coming energy surge will not be absorbed quietly. It will sit alongside growing ecosystem collapse, deeper droughts, all driving living standards down for millions of people who have already absorbed too much.
The question for Labour is whether it responds by playing within rules that are visibly failing – managing the crisis, cushioning the edges, hoping it passes – or whether it uses this moment to make a different argument entirely. To tell the public, and if necessary the bond markets, that a fundamental reorientation of the economy isn’t reckless. Rather it’s essential. That an economic system under this degree of stress can no longer afford the luxury of price gouging on the essentials of life. That extracting shareholder returns from water, energy, care and housing is not a quirk to be regulated around. It is a structural problem that demands a structural answer.
Because these are not luxuries. They are foundations. Water. Food. Energy. Transport. Housing. Care. Education. Universal. Accountable. Democratic.
And if we’re asking more of people – as we will have to, including through taxation – we must be able to say with confidence that those foundations are run in the public interest. Not as an aspiration: as a fact.
The pressures people feel are not abstract, but nor is the politics those pressures are driving. The sense that decisions are made somewhere else, by someone else, in the interests of someone else – that is the space in which Reform UK is growing. The answer cannot be to mimic that politics. It must be to offer something genuinely different.
Campaigners have warned for years that the damage being done to our rivers and ecosystems runs far deeper than a series of regulatory lapses. This isn’t just pollution. It’s the slow degradation of the natural systems that underpin everything – and when those systems fail, it isn’t felt equally. Some pay with inconvenience but others pay a far higher price.
Julie Maughan, the grieving mother whose pain and strength so moved us all, knows that better than anyone. She should not have had to become a campaigner. She should not have had to fight for answers. She should not have had to carry that loss. If her story tells us anything, it is this: this is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one. And it is time we acted like it.
Labour must decide. Is it on the side of the electorate, or on the side of the water companies? Water companies do not have a vote. I know where my loyalty lies.
Nigel Farage has now said that a Reform government would not nationalise water and energy companies, in the party’s latest policy U-turn.
Reform’s 2024 general election manifesto proposed a “new ownership model for critical national infrastructure” such as utility companies, in which the state and pension funds would own half each.
Just last summer, Farage said he was determined to bring half of the water industry back into public ownership, as it would cost “a lot less” money.
On Tuesday the party confirmed that it has now dropped the pledge, for the same reason Farage dropped his previous plans to enact £90 billion in tax cuts – due to the UK’s finances.
In November, Reform dropped the £90 billion tax cuts plan that it had promised before the last general election, stating that it would instead prioritise cutting public spending.
“We want to cut taxes, of course we do, but we understand substantial tax cuts given the dire state of debt and our finances are not realistic at this current moment in time”, Farage said.
Reform UK has made a number of other U-turns on key policy matters.
Most recently, Farage said that the UK “should do all we can” to help the Americans with their war on Iran.
Days later, Farage backtracked, stating: “We cannot get involved directly in another foreign war, we don’t have a Navy, we cannot even defend our own military base in Cyprus.”
In May last year, the hard-right party said it would scrap the two-child limit, which has pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
In February, former Tory Robert Jenrick said that the party would in fact reinstate the Conservative policy in full.
In the run-up to the local elections last year, Reform campaigned on a pledge to “cut your taxes”, a message that featured on many of its leaflets.
In another U-turn, Farage told the BBC that council tax “has to rise” as local authorities are in “massive debt”.
News that Reform UK is abandoning promises to renationalise utilities such as water and energy reveals the direction of travel for Britain’s populist Right. After months of watching the slow drip of high-profile Tory defections, along with renewed promises of fiscal prudence over deficit-financed tax cuts, the U-turn on public ownership has cemented the party’s latest pivot. It is now less an insurgent force, and more the new default vehicle for the UK’s mainstream centre-right.
It would always have been awkward to hear Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick arguing convincingly for positions more reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour than their own former party. Now all of them will be spared that indignity.
But as a shapeless Reform struggles to find a permanent identity that goes beyond the “Stop the Boats” mantra, Nigel Farage’s party is losing its outsider edge. With figures like Jenrick in senior positions, Reform has moved obligingly back towards the 50-year diagnostic/prescription manual of the British Right: too much state, too much immigration — so less of both, please.
The siren voices that advised the Faragists to accept Tory ship-jumpers with open arms cited the fledgling populists’ lack of governing experience: get some credible, recognised politicians on board, and doubts about your ability to wield power will fade away. Alas, this position always misunderstood Reform’s unique appeal as an anti-political, plague-on-both-your-houses outfit — a means to burn down the whole Westminster machine. Nobody was eyeing an ascendant Farage because he appeared to be operationally competent, or an able administrator for the failing ship of state. With experienced former ministers on board, the momentum behind the party has dissipated rather than built.
It is a perennial mistake of political commentators and activists to ascribe the charge of incoherence to movements whose politics do not fit neatly on the traditional Left-Right continuum. That’s why the Conservative hierarchy resorted to accusations of “socialism” when Reform began to break out of the one-dimensional spectrum with appeals to renationalisation and scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
But for the average “normie”, politics is a much more à la carte experience than it is for the rigid, partisan ideologues, with their set menu of policy opinions. For the non-obsessives, who do not define themselves ideologically but instead through broad affiliation to a diffuse “common sense” view of the world, there’s no reason why someone’s opinion on mass migration should have any bearing on their tolerance for high taxes. Nor should a person’s views on capital punishment be a certain predictor of their views on public ownership of the utilities, or on trade unions.
There were signs, once, that Farage understood this. Reform would break the mould. For the Left, the tragedy of this is that the party’s leadership is composed of libertarian, Austrian School true believers, who nevertheless draw on Boomer nostalgia for a social-democratic, postwar age of industrial statism. The Reform base for Making Britain Great Again harks back longingly to an era of economic security, with a sense of social cohesion and mass common culture that a closed, strictly national, Fordist economy and a top-down state provided
In promising to nationalise utilities and rebuild lost manufacturing jobs, Reform was edging towards a kind of syncretic, big-tent populism that represented the genuine centre ground of British politics. On the one hand was advocacy for an active state which intervened on behalf of the “man in the street” against rapacious corporations. On the other was the articulation of a robust patriotism, a desire for sustainable levels of migration, and a suspicion of cultural radicalism. It looks now like that project is over. Beneath the mask, the Conservative Party 2.0 has revealed itself.
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.
