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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

They call it an outrage, they talk about public outcry - yet this is the democratic will of the British people. This was not an accident - this was a choice.

It was a manifesto promise by the conservatives to privatise water companies, and so they did.

It was a manifesto promise by the conservatives to cut environmental regulations, and so they did.

This is not a scandal. This is what Britain wants. Yes, like other British political decisions it might seem peculiar, but it’s their choice to make.

Those complaining are a minority, or else they would have representation in parliament that would have lead to a different outcome - and yes, you can wring your hands about how FPTP makes for an unfair democracy - but they voted for that too when given the choice to switch to STV, recently.

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Extremely incorrect. Nationalisation of water polls as a remarkably popular policy with a clear public majority in favour, even among exclusively Tory voters. As does rail.

The lack of movement on the issue is not due to lack of public will, but the lack of desire from a dying government to deliver effective policy.

Which is borne out of electoral choice. It hasn’t been the will of god that the Tories have been running the show unopposed for over a decade - it has been the will of the public.

Renationalisation of water may be popular now, but when everyone was promised cheaper water bills in the 80’s, it was an absolute tub-thumper for thatcher - same for rail - people seem to forget how much British rail was a national symbol of hatred, and the fervor with which privatisation was embraced.

No, this is public will, and governments that realise that by doing whatever idiotic thing the public is demanding today to retain and grow power prosper - at least for long enough for the cabinet to all line up a very comfortable retirement.

By the time the consequences come along, enough time has passed that it can be blamed on literally anything but any of the people responsible, from politicians who implemented it to voters who voted for it.

There seems to be confusion as to where the sewage issue has originated - while it may have manifested relatively suddenly, the circumstances have been building through policy and voter apathy for the last 35 years.

Each voter has to squeeze multiple preferences over all areas into one single vote each time.

For me, the party options are:

• Red MPs do 35% of what I want

• Blue MPs do 25% of what I want

• Yellow MPs do 49% of what I want, but basically never make any difference because there's so few of them

Which would you pick, if you were me?

I left the country because of what Blue did.

You do know the odds of a significant labour victory at the next election are high? "Those complaining" are probably now in the ascendency. They just won most regional council elections.

Renationalisation is not impossible. Which of course implies taxation to fund investment for capital works.

Well they’ve certainly changed their mind in recent months.

> Those complaining are a minority, or else they would have representation in parliament that would have lead to a different outcome - and yes, you can wring your hands about how FPTP makes for an unfair democracy - but they voted for that too when given the choice to switch to STV, recently.

The AV referendum was indeed lost, but that does not guarantee the correctness of your other claim, that "those complaining are a minority, or else they would have representation in parliament that would have lead to a different outcome".

The party in power in the UK is usually less than half of all votes cast.

And even when not, that it is representative democracy rather than referendums on literally every question means that voters have to collapse all the various topics they care about into one question of "which colour do I pick?" every couple of years — in an election there is no way to represent "I like Blue national defence, Red personal freedom, Green environmental issues, and Yellow on electoral reform", so looking at the debates listed on Wikipedia with the benefit of hindsight, even though I'm bi and the Blue party was homophobic, I might well have voted Blue due to this from the Red party:

"""On 24 May, Kinnock was interviewed by David Frost and claimed that Labour's alternative defence strategy in the event of a Soviet attack would be "using the resources you've got to make any occupation totally untenable".[citation needed] In a speech two days later Thatcher attacked Labour's defence policy as a programme for "defeat, surrender, occupation, and finally, prolonged guerrilla fighting ... I do not understand how anyone who aspires to Government can treat the defence of our country so lightly".[9]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_United_Kingdom_general_el...

In 1987, the Red party was seen as a shower of incompetence much like the Blue party is today.

I’ll confess, sardonicism does not transmit well through the written medium.

All you’ve said is entirely true.

I think the number of people who even read the manifesto is tiny. And within that group, those who realised privatisation was going to result in something other than individually (and temporarily) saving some money, even smaller. A minority you might say...

And given our low turnouts and small proportion of the country that voted for that party, saying it's what Britain wants is disingenuous.

Ok, well let’s say it’s what Britain voted for, even if they were generally wilfully ignorant as to what they were actually voting for.

For what it’s worth, I remember ecological campaigns against privatisation of water - I remember a greenpeace chap giving a talk at school saying it would result in sewage on beaches and in rivers - and here we are.

Information was available. A choice was made. We reap the consequences.

Wait, you're saying that British voters in 1989 couldn't reasonably have known the Conservative Party favoured water privatisation, because they wouldn't have read the small print of their manifesto? And also that voting margins and turnouts were so small that the election results might not be representative?

This was the third successive Thatcher government, after the previous two had sold off Britain's nationalised companies in aerospace, telecoms, car manufacturing, oil and natural gas [0]. It got reelected in a landslide victory with 75% turnout. [1].

And then you call someone else disingenuous?

The British people absolutely got what they wanted, and have only themselves to blame.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/29/short-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_United_Kingdom_general_el...

This is a highly disingenuous argument, flagged by your reference to STV, which any one versed in UK politics knows was a stitch up of the Lib Dem’s by the conservatives.

The UK is controlled by a powerful ruling class that maintains FPTP and other undemocratic institutions to their benefit, as I imagine you well know, and regular polls of the population (as noted by other responses) clearly contradict your assertion.

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