Signature wars - The government's dodgy reply..
The Government has responded to our petition for a referendum to bring the water industry into public ownership, and the reply is not pretty. Even worse, it's not true.
We smashed past the 10K threshold to require a response on the same day that Feargal Sharkey led the launch publicity on Channel 4.
A lot of signing and sharing came after many of you reponded to the video we took of Feargal at the excellent SoS Whitstable Beach Protest - this one.
Massive thanks to all the people and groups who worked hard to spread the word.
We had chosen the Government and Parliament petition because it comes with tangible things for reaching targets - first, the response at 10K, and then at 100K to be 'considered for a debate' (a bit vague) on the subject (that mostly happens, by the way, and we are determined that it will).
We crashed past 100K signatures on 30th April, but there was no doubt from the feedback we were getting, that the government response sent to many signatories and posted in full view on the sign-up page, was putting people off - by tricking them!
The gist of the message was you can't have public ownership, so don't bother, go away, you are not having a referendum or any say in your future. Luckily, a lot of you were not going away, and you already knew enough about the privatisation scam and the history of the UK to recognise nonsense when you saw it. Others may have had a reasonable expectation that their government would be telling them the truth, but it wasn't.
The government was also avoiding the point, and the reason we chose to ask for a referendum is that this is not all about the outcome and public ownership, although that is massively important; it is about government excluding the wishes and needs of the British people and excluding the truth that would have to be exposed and debated for a referendum.
And it was hoping no one would notice.
Rather helpfully, to prove our point that we need a voice and a debate of the facts, the government's response started with two big lies.
"Nationalisation would take years and involve complex legal processes,"
Nonsense, it wouldn't, as many of you who remember the banking crisis and other real events and will know. We have set some of these out further along the blog in the letter to the Environment Secretary, Emma Reynolds.
“diverting effort from cleaning up rivers, lakes and seas.”
Thanks for bringing that up! Isn't that precisely what privatised water has been doing for the past 36 years? Concentrating on cash extraction, not investment. There is absolutely no evidence to support the government's claim, and the shocking and dangerous Thames Water debacle proves our point.
The rest of the reply is so laden with rose-tinted speculation and dodgy claims that it would take up too much space to expose here, and will need another blog to show that for what it is. The enforcement illusion.
This is serious stuff, government misleading the public to dissuade people from even seeking their democratic right to have a say in something that affects all of us - the use and abuse of our water industry to use it as a money-making tool for wealthy financiers.
Therefore, we have written to the Secretary of State for Defra, Emma Reynolds, MP for High Wycombe, to ask her to get a grip and bring back honesty and integrity to her department, which has a long history of obfuscation and misrepresentation of the facts under a string of previous Environment Secretaries, and we await her reply.
You may be one of the over 115K people who were not not put off (thank you!), but if you were, please look at the evidence we have provided in the letter and if you change your mind and want to shake things up in the way hugely wealthy and powerful financial organisations are controlling our water for their profit, sign here and please share widely and with confidence:
When Thames Water started to admit serious financial collapse, the government made a massive mistake by not protecting it from predators who are always waiting for signs of weakness to exploit, and especially from the very clever financiers that manage the New York hedge funds now controlling it.
The government could have done what the hedge funds did, but was irrationally against anything that looked like state intervention to protect national security, and even now it continues to talk about 'market solutions', a position soundly dissected and discredited by the eminent economist Prof Sir Dieter Helm, who derides the senseless doubling down on mistakes.
His blog, by the way, is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand what a mess the government is making of our water future and if, after all of this, you still think we should let them get on with it, unchallenged, then that is, of course, entirely your democratic right.
Reality check.
Please don't let the government and powerful financiers take away your hope and ambition. We can have healthy rivers, we can afford a modern and effective water industry (we already paid for one but got rogue traders), but we can't afford to keep paying financial engineers to come up with new ways to rip us off.
People power and the truth are the only things that will win this, which is why both are coming under attack.
We got over 100K signatures easily enough but we want to underline that the public cannot be dismissed in favour of the people seeking access to billpayers money - we want to get a million signatures, but for now, let's set our next target at 250K. Please help us with your networks and spread the truth.
Let this be the summer of the signing.
Thanks for your support, please share.
Addressing the accelerating crisis of educator exhaustion requires dismantling the widespread societal misconception that teaching is merely an eight-to-three schedule with generous summer breaks. In reality, modern educators absorb an unsustainable blend of cognitive, administrative, and emotional demands every single day—navigating data tracking, standardized curriculum mandates, and behavioral crises while managing thirty distinct learning speeds simultaneously. I was reading through an incisive occupational health and educational psychology analysis exploring compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress among classroom staff, and chronic cortisol dysregulation over at
yaar win this morning, and realizing that systemic depletion occurs when personal empathy is leveraged to compensate for underfunded public infrastructure proves why self-care platitudes cannot fix an institutional design flaw.
Regulators like Ofwat and the Environment Agency have operated under structural budget freezes and weak enforcement mandates for over a decade, allowing water companies to treat fines as minor operational costs of doing business. Picked up a really well-explained perspective on regulatory enforcement metrics, the failure of self-monitoring discharge reports, and water utility compliance tracking via Dm First earlier, and recognizing that nominal regulatory penalties never deter corporate polluters when the cost of actual environmental compliance is ten times higher illustrates why cosmetic enforcement is no substitute for public ownership.
Examining the official ministerial brush-off handed down in response to the public petition demanding a referendum on returning the water industry to public ownership reveals an institutional playbook reliant on deflection, delay, and manufactured helplessness. When hundreds of thousands of citizens mobilize through official democratic petition portals to demand accountability for raw sewage spills and chronic debt extraction, being told that structural change is "too legally complex" reads as an intentional insult to public intelligence. I was reading through an incisive public utility economics critique dissecting statutory special administration regimes, sovereign asset buybacks, and regulatory capture in privatized monopolies over at Veergame this morning, and seeing how Whitehall consistently shields foreign equity consortia while claiming the state lacks the power to intervene highlights the vast gulf between citizen welfare…
The assertion that taking back failing monopolies like Thames Water into public hands would take endless years and cause immense disruption conveniently ignores how swiftly governments move when commercial banks or critical infrastructure face imminent systemic collapse. When financial institutions threatened economic contagion during the banking crash, emergency legislative frameworks and statutory bailouts were drafted and executed in a matter of days. A regulatory administrative lawyer on Jaiclub was detailing statutory insolvency triggers under the Water Industry Act, sovereign bond underwriting mechanisms, and special administration processes yesterday, and pointing out that the state possesses clear, proven mechanisms to step in when private operators fail proves that the claim of bureaucratic impossibility is merely political evasion.
Over thirty-five years of water privatization have functioned essentially as an aggressive wealth-extraction vehicle rather than an investment engine for national infrastructure. Billpayers’ money has been systematically diverted away from modernizing antiquated Victorian sewers and upgrading wastewater treatment works to service massive, leveraged private debt and fund multi-billion-pound dividend payouts to offshore private equity funds. Stumbled into an engaging chat exploring financial engineering in monopolistic utilities, debt-loading ratios on regulated asset bases, and systemic dividend stripping on RaxiWin recently, and realizing that ordinary households are now being coerced into funding emergency infrastructure bailouts after private investors pocketed the profits underscores why public anger is reaching a boiling point.