"Britain’s debt-laden water utilities are being encouraged by the regulator Ofwat to set up new privately financed companies to deliver billions of pounds worth of critical infrastructure such as reservoirs, treatment works and pipelines, which will be paid for through customer bills"
Outrageous. Nationalise them without compensation and abolish Ofwat, which is totally compromised.
Tori Whanau's column in this weekend's Sunday Star-Times talked about introducing water meters and charging households for water.
Have we learned nothing from the privatisation of the publicly-funded electricity network? Which has led to households facing massive price hikes since the 1990s - a contributor to the rising cost of living - while effectively subsidising commercial users who can get power much cheaper on the spot market.
I don't but one of our sons works for the NHS in Manchester.
Meanwhile Wes Streeting has taken £175,000 from donors with links to private health firms since January 2023. Labour will come for the SNHS given half a chance.
There may be no national policy of renationalising the railways, but that's where we're headed; by this year around 40% of passenger rail-KMs were being managed by the state.
This would be so much better if it were a clear & well managed policy, not the political result of fire-fighting as subsidy-hungry operators still fail to provide an acceptable service.
Like other privatisations, its time to conclude there are some 'natural monopolies' that should be state-run!
This is the classic scam. Privatise an essential service. Load it with masses of debt, while investing the minimum it can get away with. Pay shareholders as much as it can get away with. When it collapses, walk away so the state has to pick up the pieces until it becomes viable again. Rinse and repeat.
Great news for NHS privatisers this morning. The Tories' policy is working.
"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital"
Noam Chomsky
Researchers looked at 13 long-term studies from well-off countries including the #UK to examine what happened ‘before’ and ‘after’ public health provision was outsourced.
Their conclusion: Increases in privatisation generally corresponded with worse quality of care (who knew 😬 inc. dental)
A brand new Oxford University analysis has debunked #NHS privatisation.
Oxford researchers looked at studies of healthcare #privatisation and found they agreed on one thing: privatisation leads to poorer quality care for patients.
"Water companies are commercial entities and we do not comment on the financial situation of specific companies as it would not be appropriate."
A Government spokesperson.
Ludicrous. Water is an essential service. It should never be subject to such subterfuge, particularly as Thames Water is demanding being allowed to pay higher dividends, while increasing bills by 40%, and limitations on fines for serious pollution of rivers.
Another indication of what happens when private firms are involved in delivering social services... unsurprisingly, budgets include a significant element of profit for investors.
Given the crisis in capacity & the low pay of workers in the sector, the privileging of investors interests can hardly be said to be socially optimal.
It is definitely time for the sector to better (more robustly) regulated.
Remember this is England - suckers. They sold their water companies for £6Bn with no debt. They now have in excess of £60Bn in debt, serviced overseas which has the great bonus of making sure that profits are not even taxed in England.
And they think they are responsible adults who should control the other three nations of the UK?
For those of us worried about the creeping #privatisation of the #NHS, this Corporate Watch timeline sets out the long-term political project that underlies the current #Tory engineered #NHScrisis.
A great resource for those of you arguing the privileging of private resources in health care is not a recent development - the campaign against public health care in the UK has a long, and worryingly bipartisan, history!
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.
Hold on a sec, weren't we all told that privatisation would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
Weren't we told that repealing the carbon tax would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
Weren't we told that sticking with (more expensive) coal and gas power over (cheaper) renewables and storage would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
From the ABC:
"At the heart of the price gouging inquiry, initiated by the ACTU and led by Allan Fels, is determining in a high inflation environment what's general inflation and what else might be influencing pricing behaviour, the main offending price gouging industries, how they do it and how it impacts everyday Australians.
"Part of the problem is Australia is awash with oligopolies, which means there isn't as much price competition as there might otherwise be, which helps explain why real wage growth has been low and why the real prices of so many goods are so high.
"And while most of the media attention has been on Coles and Woolworths, the report will include other sectors accused of customer gouging and breaching trust such as energy, airlines and banks.
"Sydney University professor Lynne Chester, from the school of social and political sciences, supplied the inquiry with a detailed submission ... [which] said electricity prices have been escalating since 2005, largely due to increases in the charges paid for the generation of electricity. She said the charge for electricity makes up a significant component of the electricity price paid for by consumers.
"A key issue was that the regulation was designed for a competitive market, assuming competition would deliver lower prices, but the market was never competitive due to the presence of big powerful generator companies that have been merging with retail companies to create giants such as AGL, Origin and Energy Australia."
Government reducing NHS queues by not letting you see a doctor
This is an ingenious move
If you’re one of the 7 million people worried you are going to die waiting for hospital treatment, I have exciting news: the government is offering you the chance to skip the NHS queue like Catherine and Charles by not using the NHS!