Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy, yet offers nothing beyond token gestures to stop the young being priced out of home ownership. Enough, too, has been said about graduates being overcharged, pensioners soaking up the largesse of the tax and benefit systems, the failure to upgrade infrastructure, the obesity crisis, and all the other problems that can’t be tackled because of half-thought-through Tory prejudices.
Allow me instead to concentrate on the scandal of the privatised water industry. Journalists and academics have been banging on for what feels like an age about an ‘organised rip-off’, to use the words of the usually sedate Financial Times. Few took notice, and that should not surprise you. Causes can appear marginal for years. Politicians see no need to address them. Then, with no warning to those who haven’t been paying attention, they explode.
Last week Michael Robinson of the BBC presented a superb documentary on what Thames Water had done to London and the southeast. Most infamously, the company poured 1.4 billion litres of sewage into the Thames near Marlow alone, destroying fish and fouling the home lives of river-side residents. The residents were also its customers. Not that Thames Water seemed to care. Water is a private monopoly. Why should it bother itself about the feelings of people who had nowhere else to go? After hearing how managers ignored warnings from workers about persistent equipment failures, Judge Francis Sheridan encapsulated their attitude when he said that the company had presided over ‘a shocking and disgraceful state of affairs’.
As shocking is the way that the former owners of Thames, the Australian bank Macquarie, was able to pass its costs on to the public.
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