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A tsunami is made of many droplets

A tsunami is made of many droplets

The mismanagement of Thames Water is not the first scandal of its kind, but when our very water is at risk it is time to stop letting rich people pretend they are best left in charge

~ Rob Ray ~

Back in the 2000s, before it was all being run by TfL, I wrote a bit about maintenance on the London Underground by a company called Metronet. It was a typical setup for the time, one of Tony Blair’s bright ideas for shoehorning private money into public services via Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). The sort of one hand feeds the other endeavour that Wes Streeting hopes to ram down the throat of the NHS.

I remember being, at the time, a little shocked (I was but a youthful anarchist and less wise to the ways of scumbags) to find out exactly how blatant the corruption involved in that enterprise was. You see, the company was constantly in financial trouble. The State would give it vast sums of money to do a job, such as track repair, yet somehow poof, it all disappeared, owed to a wide array of providers that seemed to be heavily overcharging for their services but still kept winning contracts.

And well they might, because you see those providers were also in many cases the owners of Metrolink. Why would they care if it ran up arrears to them? It’s a neat little trick when you can send your subsidiary crawling to the public purse, swearing blind that it’s in huge debt because it just can’t make money from the paltry amount that’s already been handed out, so can it have some more please? And eventually, in due course (2009) the company goes bankrupt still owing this money. Guess which muggins ends up paying. All probably perfectly legal, of course.

I was thinking of the Metrolink saga when reading about Thames Water this week and its intense financial troubles, which have led to Serious Concerns that nationalisation may be required. Our capital’s core utility company is in massive debt, £19 billion at last count, and says it needs another £3bn, plus a 33% raising of our bills, to stay afloat, but what would really sort things out would be a quick nationalisation just to, y’know, clear the outstanding debts. A bit of a clean slate and a reset before re-privatising.

And of course, shareholders should not be getting their customary payouts when the company is doing so poorly, after all that’s the risk … sorry couldn’t finish that one without a wan smile. They’re getting payouts. The ownership structure of the company is Byzantine, so much so that even on their own website they need to use a flowchart to break it all down, but in sum, the people Thames Water owes are mostly the shareholders. You know, the ones who took £7.2 billion in dividends? They’re now demanding we either pay them back for the money they robbed piecemeal by jacking what we pay as customers, or maybe clean the slate by getting the money from the State, which then comes out of our services. As though their “investments” should come with privatised profit, and socialised risk.

Labour meanwhile, of course, are at a loss about what to do. As the administrators are approached the neoliberal take is being sorely stretched, with Rachael Reeves trying hard to avoid both the expense of taking charge and the possibility of shareholder groups, which include the universities pension fund, taking too big a haircut. Bad for business, you see. It’s currently waiting to see if things fall over by themselves, having done nothing about Ofwat’s deeply unpopular decision to raise the rates. 

It’s a mess not entirely of modern Labour’s making – privatisation happened in 1989 and it’s been a long road to get here – but these are the self-conscious inheritors of Blair, and it is in large part the fault of his government, its zeal for sell-offs leading it to ignore the gigantic dividend yields being extracted by then-owners Macqarie. Much as 2000s Labour allowed itself to be ripped off by Metrolink, 2020s Labour is poised to do the same again via Kemble Water Holdings (the top tier holding company owned by the shareholders). This is a party that isn’t learning from Blair so much as aping him.

Are we all helpless in watching yet another brassy heist go down, dragging our bank balances with it? To a degree. Macquarie have already legged it with their ill-gotten gains, and are merrily running everything from windfarms to airports. London’s Silvertown Tunnel project, which ballooned from £600 million to £2.2bn and is charging a £4 toll when it opens in April? That’s them. Little suggestion of any consequences for their behaviour has ever been made. If Thames simply goes under then there might be something of a hit for the current investors (though the biggest losers will be the pension scheme for Ontario Municipal Workers and the Universities Superannuation Plan). But then the cost of rebuilding the system will fall on the State. Which means that the 33% hike, or possibly even more, will be here to stay in the absence of any other factors.

There is a campaign aimed at heading that off. The Take Back Water campaign, in similar vein to Don’t Pay, has been trying to build momentum for a more coherent public intervention in the sector. It’s a worthy plan, though seems to have been on hiatus over the holidays, and points to what we could, in theory, start doing more often and more intensively. We absolutely should take back water. And not just that, but our influence and say in every part of the means of life. 

We’re very used to treating utilities as services, and thinking of ourselves as customers. But these are not just services. Water, heat, light, food, a roof over our heads – they aren’t just things which the government does for us, or that a pretend-competitive market force magically provides in exchange for money. They’re how millions of people survive in order to do everything else. 

If you can’t get the basic method of sharing those right it’s no wonder the rest is falling apart. It’s no wonder everything feels like a zero-sum game where one of us winning means the rest losing. These things aren’t theirs, and they aren’t ours in that airy fairy “via the government” way Statists love to try on. They are ours. By the right of being human. By the right of our ancestors’ labour, and our own, and by the fundamental property of land that was never given, but taken, by those who now claim they know best while continually using these things to make us impoverished and desperate.

Thames Water is not the first mess of its kind, or even the most egregious. But it is the most basic building block of our lives turned into yet another tormentor. A form of corruption embedded as deeply in the “populist right” as it ever will be in new new Labour or that shambling homunculus formerly known as the natural party of government. The solution is for working people to remember who exactly this is supposed to all be for, and act.

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