My response to media reports that England is facing drastic measures due to extreme drought next year:
This crisis wasn’t just made by the weather. It was manufactured by decades of political cowardice and corporate greed.
Privatised water hasn’t just failed. It will be remembered as one of the most criminal acts in Britain’s long history of failed privatisations.
Since privatisation, England has sold off or decommissioned nearly half of its publicly owned reservoirs.
Companies then siphoned billions in dividends while failing to build new capacity or fix leaks that now waste 3 billion litres of treated water every day enough to fill more than 1,200 Olympic swimming pools every 24 hours.
Now they want to build new reservoirs, decades too late and they want us to pay for them.
That’s like selling off your house, pocketing the cash, then sending the bill to taxpayers to rebuild it when it you’ve burnt it down.
This is the great water con of our time: Sell the assets; Let infrastructure rot; Blame the weather; Bill the public for the rebuild.
Building reservoirs alone won’t solve the problem. Without reform, they’ll simply become new profit streams for private operators.
Real resilience requires two things:
1) Public ownership: If we knew water was ours, we’d back a national programme of conservation and efficiency. Ownership builds responsibility. People protect what they own.
2) A massive leak-reduction and efficiency drive: Every second, thousands of litres vanish into the ground from burst pipes while executives take home bonuses for “performance”. The only word for that is ‘criminal’.
This isn’t just about dry rivers and hosepipe bans. It’s about our food, our farms, our future. Water is a national treasure, not a commodity.
And yet we have a government and an opposition afraid to face that truth because it means confronting the system itself.
The privatisation of water will go down as one of the gravest policy failures of the modern era, a textbook case of private profit over public good.
The climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis are two faces of the same monster – corporate greed and ecological destruction.
It’s time to wake up and smell the rancid stench of stagnation under this system.
We need a Labour government that faces the future – not one that tells us it “costs too much” to care for the essentials of life.
Water belongs to all of us.
And the longer we leave it in private hands, the drier and poorer, we’ll all become.