Jan 16, 2025
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It’s not just Tunbridge Wells – a country famous around the world for its rain is in danger of self-imposed drought, says Guardian columnist
The theme here is the lack of investment, no matter how disastrous the consequences. The main water treatment works in the capital is “on its last legs”, said the chair of the Independent Water Commission, Jon Cunliffe, last summer, while publishing his review for the government of the water industry. Just one major fault at the 60-year-old plant, operated by Thames Water, and “millions of Londoners [would be] without running water”, forcing mass evacuations and the army to go on standby, says the FT. Just how badly the privatised water industry has trashed our waterways is well known. You can’t step in the same river twice, said Heraclitus, but he has been outbid by ecologists who advise that, you know what, you might not want to step in any river in England once. Much less covered is the prospect of parts of the country running out of water entirely, yet government officials and ministers accept it is looming, especially for London and along the east of England. Add some extra responsibility, by all means, to climate breakdown and the sprawl of housing, but 30-plus years of running the water industry for excessive returns has left us badly exposed. Keir Starmer dreams of AI superpower status, while our ever-distracted media offers hot-and-cold running updates on the Beckhams alongside 24/7 Trumpvision. Yet the UK is lurching into a future that, when you stop to think about it, is both more alarming and remarkable: a country famous around the world for its rain imposing on itself a drought.
22 January 2026
"By requiring seniors and disabled Americans to enroll...at the same field offices they are trying to close...Trump and Musk are trying to create chaos and inefficiencies at SSA so they can privatize the system.” -- Congressman John Larson (D)
ID: “THE LONDON ECONOMIC
"Everything is too expensive and nothing works. £200bn of our money has been paid out to shareholders for privatised utilities like rail, mail, energy and busses.
That's money that could have gone into reducing customers' bills or investing in infrastructure. It hasn't, it's gone out in the form of shareholder profit. If you look at social care, which is really the monster under the bed when you look at any local authority's budget, the role of private equity is disgusting. So the first thing we need to do is admit that privatisation has been a failed experiment, it has cost this country dearly and it is an experiment that needs to end."
-ASH SARKAR”.
The big thing to remember about this, and what all of us must keep reiterating when we talk about it, is that the justifications about “efficiency savings” for privatisation were simply blatant lies.
We need to make it clear that we are absolutely aware that the motive for doing so was private profit and the transfer of public assets into the hands of private individuals, many of them the actual people, or related to the people, who proposed it and/or keep perpetuating it. So every time said politicians talk about the need for “savings” on the back of people on benefits, receiving social care, or workers in the public sector, we turn their narrative onto these facts.
Reaganomics and Thatcherism
In its refusal to nationalise water, it’s clear the government operates in the interests of private capital and not of the country, says Gua
It’s a simple test: does the government operate in the interests of the country, or in the interests of private capital? This shouldn’t be a difficult choice for Labour to make, yet, as with so many such tests, it flunks it. Why? Because it is terrified of any measure that might alienate even the most parasitic and extractive forms of capital. Strangely, however, it seems to have no qualms about alienating the rest of us.
Social Security and Medicare and debt Manufacturing consent