How can you lose money as the monopoly supplier of water to anyone, never mind to 15 million people? And how can you have paid dividends on £900 million of profit last year, yet go bust this year owing £10 billion? Guess who is going to be making up that shortfall. Privatisation was supposed to pass the risk to the private sector. How many times do we have to see that that was not case? And again, what risk? How can you lose money as a monopoly supplier of water?
Did nothing come out when we turned on a tap before 1989? Did cholera? Were there water riots? Are there still in Scotland and Wales? Are there in any remotely advanced country, since apart from a handful of American towns, the only two places to have privatised water have been England and its then prototype, Pinochet's Chile?
Permanent renationalisation is massively popular, but of course the Labour Party is against it. So much for its dominant faction's Europeanism, since privatised water would be unimaginable anywhere else in the EU. So much for the EU, which did nothing to prevent or reverse the privatisation of water. And so much for the Conservative Party's commitment to national sovereignty, that it can allow England's water supply to be 70 per cent foreign-owned.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Owned by the sovereign wealth funds of China and Aby Dhabi, why can't they bail it out?
ReplyDeleteQuite. But it is better this way. Something this dependent on the British State belongs as part of the British State, and this makes that point. At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt-free.
Delete