Water Features

Any water shortage in Britain would be downright laughable, except that it is not funny at all. While betting the farm on solar energy, our lords and masters cannot cope with the Sun in the summer. There are restrictions on water use despite a spring that would have given Noah a run for his money. But by what authority does a private company impose, for example, a hosepipe ban? By what means does it enforce such a prohibition? British Gas has been forced to pay £20 million into a redress fund after it broke into people’s homes and installed prepayment meters. Obviously, no party suggests renationalising the energy companies, as the huge majority of the electorate would favour. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence. That merger was also evident from the way in which everyone in politics seemed to be tied to Fujitsu when the Post Office scandal broke, and it is evident now in relation to BlackRock, Palantir, and others. Yet Andy Burnham talks only of “public control” rather than public ownership. State ownership of key national infrastructure is fine as long as it is someone else’s state, which our own will permit and assist to enforce itself upon and against our people not only in their own homeland, but even in their own homes.

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. What would you pay for shares in the water companies? They are worthless. “The value of your investment may go down as well as up.” 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? She does not appear to be alone in that view. It is possible that Barry Gardiner and Emily Thornberry have declined appointments, but it is still notable that not even they have been made Ministers. There is nothing for Jon Trickett, who was in the Shadow Cabinet of Ed Miliband, having been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Gordon Brown. There is nothing for Rebecca Long-Bailey or Andy McDonald, both of whom were initially in the Shadow Cabinet even of Keir Starmer. And so on. Gardiner, Thornberry, Long-Bailey and McDonald all nominated Burnham, as did most of the Campaign Group, with no member of it nominating anyone else. And for what? Think on.