Labour’s football policy seems to be working well.
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Give everybody a ball and restrict all concept of competition?
I would agree with that, but there must have been some self-censorship. It will be interesting to see what they say when Labour throws the door open.
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I’ve just been watching the BBC Breakfast news. Apparently, the English water companies want to put bills up 74%.
Funny how they kept that quiet until after the General Election. I think Starmer should send Feargal Sharkey to bite their kneecaps off.
Interestingly, the BBC presenter said that the water bills are slightly different in Scotland. Well it’s state owned, funded by a surcharge on the council tax and unmetered at the point of use. So yes, it is “slightly” different from a private monopoly grifting it by the drop.
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And, it’s drinkable 
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Yeah, when i lived and worked “darn sauff” I did not enjoy crunchy tea.
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It needs to be renationalised but that still wont resolve the problems. Welsh Water is not in a great state either, even as an example of a non profit organisation.
I honestly have no idea how you start to turn it round. It has to be paid for and those water companies private or public will lean heavily on the private sector to get any work done, as they are already.
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Good article, this:
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I have an alternative analysis.
This election represents a much healthier democratic expression, and the electorate finally waking up to the reality of what first past the post actually means.
Forget about the Tories vote share going down - they have destroyed the country and every hates them. Of course their vote share is going down.
Labour’s vote share also went down, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.
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Just within the Labour Party, it shows a much more ruthless, focussed election machine, turning out the vote where it matters and not worrying so much about where it doesn’t. Labour are the LFC to The Tories Man City. They have a lot less money to throw around, so they have to box clever and make the most of every pound.
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It shows a huge surge towards tactical voting, which itself is act of political engagement. The exciting adventures of Sir Ed Davey don’t result in a 70 seat haul, without a lot of tactical voting and vote borrowing. It’s a face value reading that suggests that those Lib Dem votes were cast with either the expectation or hope that the Lib Dem would be forming the government. In reality, I’d argue that everyone voting Lib Dem did so with the knowledge that it would contribute to a Labour Government, and in many cases that might have actually been the point.
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Then you have to throw into the mix all the voter disenfranchisement (the ID stuff in particular will have hurt Labour more than the Tories) andthe fact that the opinion polls have been predicting a landslide for months which will have led to complacency.
Put it this way. If there was a decision to re run the election tomorrow, but make it entirely about the vote share, there is no way Labour aren’t getting significantly more than 35%.
It’s typical left wing self flagellation to join the right in suggesting Labour taking 35% of the vote is an existential crisis. I don’t recall the right having any kind of self reflection over the Tories taking power on 36% of the vote in 2010 or 2015. I don’t recall any notes of caution in 2017 that May hung on to power with only 2% more votes than Corbyn.
For decades the Tories have been taking power on tiny vote shares and manipulating FPTP to deliver huge majorities they scarcely deserve. Whenever that is pointed out from the left (as I have done) the response is to get over it. It’s just how the system works and it delivers strong government where otherwise there would be coalition, chaos and compromise. Funny to see these bellends do a total 180 pivot on the issue.
Of course Reform are a worry, but they are about to find out being a parliamentary concern means they are actually scrutinised and held to account, rather than being free to shout lies and slogans from the sidelines. Farage is the political equivalent of that twat at the football who spends all game shouting at the players how useless they all are, suddenly being told to get his boots on and have a go. I still think their appeal has limits.
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Maybe the number has been downplayed, and maybe the government has not been trumpeting it, but the water companies have certainly not been concealing the scope of the problem. Thames Water has been saying they will run out of cash for operations in 2025 since 2022, and that rates will need to be dramatically increased in order to fund desperately needed capital investments since 2023.
There may be no alternative to wiping out private equity and applying a stiff haircut to bondholders, but no one should be naive enough to think that won’t have consequences in the capital markets. If ratepayers don’t fund the capital budget, it will have to be taxpayers. No one else is going to fund a generational deficit on the UK’s behalf.
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People seem to forget in these discussions that the on-time, on-budget, on-scope HS2 project is the most recent foray of the British state into public construction of infrastructure.
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It’s the most recent case of the British state pissing money into private coffers.
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That’s practically a synonym for ‘public infrastructure investment’, just because the final payer is public doesn’t mean the usual process is not going to play out. It is ferociously hard to do otherwise - and it certainly isn’t going to happen in the incredibly short time scales needed for the British water sector.
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I’m hopeful that a proper tendering procurement and delivery regime will be established under Labour will address a log of these delivery issues. Has to be better than ‘my mate Andy from Uni has just set up a company….’
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I think that is likely, it is pretty clear that the past government sort of chucked all pretense out the window. But people who believe that an infrastructure investment campaign on the order of £30B needed yesterday can be launched without some significant profit-taking are simply deluded.
For OMERS, Thames Water has become a career killer. The guy who pushed the investment in 2017 was gone by 2018, having seen Thames Water hit with a record fine just 8 days after they closed their purchase from Macquarrie. The person in charge of the file thereafter has now been shuffled out as a consequence of the final write-off in May, where the OMERS board deemed Thames Water ‘uninvestible’. It has been remarkable to see how the water sector has been in absolute crisis for at least 7 years, and on the verge of collapse for almost 3, yet most of the UK has been sleepwalking. The current round of investment plans in discussion aren’t even to have a good, modern water sector, just avoid collapse and start eliminating catastrophic spillage. There are water treatment plants that were built in the early 60’s with an expected lifetime of 30 years still operating without substantial refits at any point - they were initially privatized to avoid the public needing to make the investments required.
For those interested, a solid discussion here from the OMERS(-critical) point of view May 17, 2024 « PrefBlog
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It ultimately needs to come back into public control. Any natural monopoly like Water, transport, etc needs to be kept away from the private sector.
Time and again privatisation proves to be a failed experiment. Privatised profits, socialised risk and investment.
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Yes it needs to come back under public control but that is also worrisome.
Firstly there will be a massive temptation for water companies having secured a massive capital budget to lob it over the fence to a consultant and say, “sort me a work plan”. That consultant needs to be procured via a broken public sector tendering process. Once secured at great cost they think about stuff. Cash starts bleeding, before you even get a shovel in the ground. More tendering and so on, budget gone.
I would like to hope that water companies know their asset condition and where their priorities are (I had this very conversation with parts of Welsh Water) but I strongly suspect they dont.
So sure you can lob a heap of cash in that direction but the whole process of identifying work and streamlining procurement needs serious sorting beforehand.
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You could equally say the same of public ownership. I think that is really a matter of ideological predisposition. Any natural monopoly is going to produce groups that see an opportunity for rent-seeking. Handing them over to the public sector just changes the label on the groups that carve out the rents. Perhaps you happier with bloated inefficient organizations paying unionized workers to preside over decaying infrastructure than paying dividends to fat cats, which is understandable enough I guess, but it is hardly in the public interest either. Writ large, it was the lignification of the British economy with that sort of organization that created the conditions to produce Thatcher.
My personal view is that they are just inherently very difficult precisely they are such a perfect instrument for rent-seeking. All things being equal, perhaps better those rents are more widely distributed than in concentrated private hands, but the problem with public sector monopolies is they very quickly grow aware that they are indefinite - which means entrenched. At least private sector managers can be displaced over terms, but then the problem you face is the need to structure and enforce agreements that require a longer planning horizon than the incumbents have control. It is difficult to get that correct.
That said, UK privatization has been a disaster for about a generation, it is probably no more reasonable to expect that the same state will get the next private management regime right than it is to expect they will get the next massive public infrastructure investment right.
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I’ve read analysis that it has been mainly the case that the markets have acknowledged that it’s because Thames Water is a basket case, rather than being the general rule.
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