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Comment by sandbags | Hacker News Reader

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources.

What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992.

So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer.

Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.

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When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself.

I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst because unlike high bills or increasing numbers of people not being served it's more or less invisible to the public while companies and shareholders rake in a lot of money, but doing that causes problems tax payers end up footing the bill for down the road, and it may not always be obvious to the public what the cause was.

A power company who makes profit by neglecting the condition of their power lines can cause a wild fire, but it takes a lot of time, taxpayer money, and luck to identify that the lines were the source of the fire, to discover that the company knew (or should have known) about the problem and done something about it, to get enough proof of those things that a lawsuit is possible, and to fight it out in court in order to hold the company accountable. It's not just the cost of fire the public is on the hook for in that case, but the costs of everything else too.

> I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst

Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn.

The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system.

This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The road network will also face the same fate since much of it was built >50 years ago and has a life expectancy of roughly 50 years. The country simply can't afford to replace it.

The thing is, if a water company is in good financial health, with low debt and lots of money to invest in infrastructure, it’s completely legal for private equity to buy the company, stop investing in infrastructure, take out loans until a third of customer bills go on interest payments, and take the loaned money as ‘management fees’.

Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.

In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.

Can you show me which UK water companies are in such a situation?

My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.

Sure thing!

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgleg70r7rno

> When Thames was privatised in 1989, it had no debt. But over the years it borrowed heavily and its total debt - which includes all of its borrowings and liabilities - now stands at £22.8bn, according to latest financial results, external.

> Its debt pile increased sharply when Macquarie, an Australian infrastructure bank, owned Thames Water, with debts reaching more than £10bn by the time the company was sold in 2017.

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516

> Macquarie and its investors paid £5.1bn for Thames Water, of which £2.8bn was money Macquarie had borrowed [...] £2bn had subsequently been repaid. Not by Macquarie and its investors, who had originally borrowed the money, but from new borrowings raised by Thames Water through a Cayman Islands subsidiary.

> Martin Blaiklock said: "That letter was a red flag to me because it showed clearly that the debt which Macquarie funds had used to buy Thames Water had been transferred over to Thames Water." [...]

> the total returns made by the bank and its investors from Thames Water averaged between 15.5% and 19% a year. Mr Blaiklock has 40 years of experience in such matters and said these returns were "twice what one would normally expect"

According to https://news.sky.com/story/approval-for-higher-bills-and-loa...

> The company, which has been crumbling under a £16bn debt pile, was due to run out of money in about a month's time. It has now received court approval for another £3bn loan [...] the company's gearing ratio is 80% and its annual debt interest bill is around £900m (about a third of the revenue it gets from customer bills) [...]

> The water regulator has sanctioned bill increases of 35% by 2030.

> However, Thames wants more. It is seeking a 53% increase, which would take the average bill to £677 a year

This stuff's all pretty widely documented and reported, if your idea of fun is getting angry and depressed while also reading about business accounting.

The flip side of this is that Thames Water is clearly not an ongoing concern and can therefore be re-nationalised at zero cost [0]. I believe there's language in the original privatisation deal around this.

Ofc, that doesn't claw back the billions that the PE pirates made off with, but at least the UK wouldn't have to pay them even more to get its water supply under control again.

[0] even if the UK had to pay market value for it, the market value for a business so drowning in debt would be close to zero.

> My provider is Thames Water. They are losing money.

Are they losing money because costs exceed revenue, or are they losing money because they are servicing massive loan interest on money they already distributed to shareholders?

Page 10 of their 24/25 annual report says they only pay 8% toward interest payments, the largest outgoing is infrastructure, then opex.

https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/l13deqmw/thames-...

I'm not a financial wiz, but it seems like they are playing games here, as a huge chunk of their stated losses for the year is some sort of loan write-off against their parent company.

> £1,271 million of expected credit loss provision recognised against the intercompany loan receivable from TWUL’s immediate parent company, Thames Water Utilities Holdings Limited. This balance is fully provided for, as it is not deemed recoverable

It blows my mind that this is legal in any developed nation. The whole PE playbook seems like embezzlement carried out in broad daylight.

That's because it is!

That doesn’t answer the question.

However, any money paid to shareholders while accumulating debt, including deferred maintenance, etc was financial smoke and mirrors not actual profit.

yes, paying dividends out of debt is completely illegal

but apparently not if you wrap it in half a dozen companies in various tax havens

(that have no legitimate purpose other than various types of laundering)

Does the government not do this?

Unless you're trying to ask "is the level of corruption in government nonzero", the answer is unequivocally no because the government doesn't have shareholders.

In the last 10 years, they did £18107.3m turnover, and cumulative -1180.3m loss.

Poor shareholders, mainly Ontario Municipal retirement fund pensioners, who are the biggest ones (32%) and retired British academics (20%).

And yet they have paid dividends until last year and the regulator has now banned them from doing so without approval and fined them, too.

They are a scam operation, frankly.

What is the debt load of TW? Cost of servicing it?

You're arguing a kind of strawman of unbridled economic liberalism which hasn't existed in England since probably the late 19th century, if at all.

Based on "a third of customer bills go on interest payments", I'd guess the original comment was about Thames Water.

In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67357566

> they also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers

Yes and they have been fined for doing so, thus proving my point. These companies have statutory obligations. See the Water Industry Act 1991 and subsequent legislation.

So sewage wasn't dumped, because the law prevented it? Or sewage was dumped, and it was against the law?

I'm having a hard time reconciling the theoretical claims made in the thread with the blinding light of what actually happened.

Well sewage has to be dumped (especially in storm conditions), and the water companies have licences to do so. However Thames was found to be in breach of the license, so were fined.

Many people claim these things happen because "shareholders" however it was completely widespread practice to dump sewage before privatisation and the system is literally designed to do so. This doesn't make it OK, however.

Sewage doesn't have to be dumped. Simply separate your black water and grey water. Storm drains can go to rivers (if the rivers have capacity – if not, it's sometimes easier to give the river more capacity than to build more sewers), and the amount of water in sewage pipes will be independent of the amount of rain.

Sure, the sewers might not currently be designed that way, but that can be changed. (It's a logistical challenge, but it needs to be done.)

Aye, the fact that the WHOLE system would cost trillions to upgrade doesn't stop anyone from upgrading it slowly in this way. The problem will still exist in 50 years, any progress is better than none.

This is such a pedantic point.

How does it add anything to the conversation?

If a sewer system can be designed such that dumping sewage need never occur, you can earmark some of the budget for gradually introducing this property into your sewer system. The more such improvements you make, the less often you'll have to dump sewage, until you never have to. Thames Water could have done this.

We already know that more things can be done, in a better way, etc., if given more resources, more time, better decision makers, etc.

That’s true for all organizations.

They were fined. That must have hurt. They must have made a pinky promise to never do it again.

Subsequent legislations are EU directives (and associated EU fines), which are not as corrupted as local legislations, and forced the UK to start building the Thames Tideway for instance. The population chose Brexit though.

Governments don't pay for infrastructure by saving up surplus tax revenue in a piggy bank. They take out loans to pay for it, same as the water companies do. The UK pays around 8% of its spending on interest payments and that's rising rapidly, despite the fact it can print money.

British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.

You really twist yourself around here. But this?

> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!

The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.

> The Tories are a centre-left party.

Oh boy. That's funny.

> much of their base having defected to Reform.

Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.

Maybe they are now (I doubt it), but they surely weren't under Thatcher.

The Tories decided to flank Farage from the right during the last elections. Calling them "centre-left" is a joke.

Correct. But by "decades" I meant in the 40 years since Thatcher.

Water was privatized in the 90s after Thatcher.

The pipes that "are Victorian and should have been replaced before privatisation" were around before then.

They have had plenty of time to replace them.

>The Tories are a centre-left party.

You honestly believe this? If so: Jesus H. Christ!

I was hopeful that the eventual endgame of right wingers blaming everything on the left when the right was in charge for literal decades would be for them to eventually maybe consider that that wasn't the problem.

Turns out I was wrong, all it takes is to no-true-scotsman everything into the "bad wrong left wing" bucket on the quest to move the overton window ever rightwards. Hilarious. The mental gymnastics knows no bounds.

You must think that the lib dems are now more conservative than them.

Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks

>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.

In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.

The US Postal Service has been running at a loss since 2007. It lost $9.5bn last year, despite a colossal bailout in 2022 that was supposed to return it to profitability. Most of these losses can be attributed to pension and healthcare costs. The USPS is pretty much the worst example of a sustainable nationalised business that you could possibly choose.

Only because of legislative sabotage in 2006 by right wing ideologues determined to prove that public services "can't work"

https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407

The problem that's at-least-purporting-to-address is one facing all the levels of government: boomers promised themselves future taxpayers would give them lots of services (money) while setting aside wholly insufficient capacity to make it fair to the future working citizens.

Yes, in theory nationalized companies can set prices rationally and turn a profit. In practice they rarely manage this for long because sooner or later a populist comes along and forces them to lower prices in order to win votes. It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor, it's a big part of how he won votes, meaning they've been building up a huge tech debt backlog. He clearly expects that the rest of the country will eventually bail London out and he'll be seen as the hero.

The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.

Could you explain the case that TfL charges too low for fares due to a "socialist" mayor? Looking at the agency's reported recovery ratios, they actually recover more than 100% of their direct operating costs on the Underground from fares, and even buses have a 70% ratio. In the Western world this is actually abnormally high; in NYC buses don't even clear 20%. It's possible some of this gap is explained by accounting differences, but nonetheless London is clearly not charging cheap fares.

The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.

This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.

Since lockdowns I think the underground only recovers around 70% of its operating costs. Maybe you have seen different figures?

The freezes eliminated investment projects needed to keep pace with population growth. There's also just big problems maintaining the stations and doing more than the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on. Travel on it and the stations are dirty, overly hot, etc.

Drivers on London's roads are very heavily taxed already, supposedly to reflect those externalities. Public transport obviously also contributes to pollution and congestion, especially when building underground lines, it's not externality-free.

I don't think TfL has a cost crisis. Crossrail overran but that was mostly due to the software complexities of the signalling tech debt around the Heathrow tunnels and other issues that can affect any kind of project. It's just hard to tell right now because they can't build at all.

The fare freeze was broken by central government briefly, but only by bribing Khan with central government money for upgrades. Exactly the outcome he wanted!

> The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.

Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.

If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.

When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?

Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).

The difficulty of getting people to vote for tax rises is a good justification for privatization. This difficulty isn't some uniquely right wing thing. The Democrats and Labour don't campaign on general tax rises either. At most, the left are willing to campaign on "tax rises for people who aren't you". That's because any party that wants to raise taxes on the majority loses.

So, governments of any color have to work with that as a constraint. Given that nobody has worked out how to convince everyone to accept big increases to their tax bills, you can either pay for new expenditures with borrowing or with cuts elsewhere. Sometimes cutting elsewhere is also hard, so either:

1. Everything gets put on the credit card. This ends badly.

2. Stuff is privatized. This yields an immediate cash influx, and voters are usually happy with the results which is why very few privatizations have been rolled back. The reason is that outside of very left wing spaces most people trust private companies on pricing much more than governments. Private companies run special offers, sales, sometimes cut prices even in the face of inflation and can be visibly seen competing on price. Government owned organizations never do this.

It's also (quietly) popular with governments on both left and right for another reason - it means they have less stuff to manage and less stuff that can blow up. If there's a problem with a privatized industry they can just tell you to switch to a competitor instead of needing to campaign on it and promise to do better.

Natural monopolies do exist and sometimes governments just have to bite the bullet and run such things themselves. But there's a lot of room to debate what is and isn't a natural monopoly.

> The Democrats and Labour don't campaign on general tax rises

They should try it. We desp3rately need to move the Overton window on this.

Tax is good. We need more of it. A screamingly obvious fact. Give us a chance, please, to vote for it.

> It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor

In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.

> The US is a very right wing country.

Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.

> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.

You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.

I don't think Trump is anyone's idea of a textbook conservative, especially not economically. He's a former democrat with populist instincts. Such politicians are often popular. It's frequently said in the UK that the median British voter is socially conservative and economically liberal.

It's true that the US subsidizes its road network. The effect is somewhat different though. If TfL doesn't get enough money in due to price controls then the network just degrades. If the US subsidizes its roads, the network can be maintained using subsidies. For it to be equivalent, roads would have to be privately owned but unable to charge the true cost of maintenance.

The point is that the US doesn't subsidise rail, and yet they do exercise price controls on many forms of rail, so on both fronts rail is screwed when it comes to competing with road travel

> I don't think Trump is anyone's idea of a textbook conservative, especially not economically

I'm just going off what you said above:

> The US is a very right wing country. > It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.

I don't think he is a traditional conservative either, but rather a right-wing nationalist ethno-socialist.

However, the fact is that he has the near unanimous support of most "textbook conservatives", both in Congress and in the broader Republican party, as evidenced by their voting for and supporting a massive debt-exploding budget and their silence in the face of his ethno-nationalist executive actions.

If he isn't a textbook conservative, neither are they.

I'm just piling on but:

> a textbook conservative, especially not economically

Wtf is a text book conservative supposed to be, exactly? And have we ever had one?

All the republicans in my life have raised the national debt and spent their time passing laws about culture war issues.

Conservatives have generally been at least somewhat pro-market. American Republicans haven't been fiscally responsible, but until Trump they were meaningfully more pro-market than the alternative. Trump's economic views have at least as much in common with Bernie Sanders (as Bernie keeps pointing out!) as with pre-Trump Republicans.

> Trump's economic views have at least as much in common with Bernie Sanders (as Bernie keeps pointing out!) as with pre-Trump Republicans

This is a myth that has the effect (intended or not) of normalizing Trump's economic policies with Bernie supporters.

Bernie Sanders only says that Trump speaks politically about the same working class struggles that he speaks about. That's it.

Bernie opposes 99% of Trump's actual economic policies, including the broad tariffs that are hitting the working class the hardest.

The only other economic policy Trump has done is tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting social safety net programs. Those are in direct conflict with everything Bernie stands for, but they are wholly supported by nearly all pre-Trump Republicans. If you have any doubts about that, just review the vote tally from the big beautiful bill.

Trump has certainly dragged his party towards the left economically speaking. With lots of squealing and resistance, but they went there in the end because it's popular with voters. They haven't managed to win people over on fiscal conservatism despite trying.

But US politics plays out in many ways, including at the local level. For water supply who the POTUS is doesn't matter that much, it's not handled at the federal level. American political outcomes vs the rest of world are the result of long term social trends beyond any one man.

> Trump has certainly dragged his party towards the left economically speaking

Only rhetorically, but that's just fodder for his blue collar base.

In practice he's done the opposite. His massive tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting of the social safety net is Reaganism/Thatcherism at its most explicit, and his broad tariffs are a tax on people who spend most of their income in survival.

> This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.

Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?

>Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment

The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.

Their voters obviously don't agree. Not only have they defected to Reform on a massive scale, but Reform recruiting former Tories like Dorries is hugely controversial within the party base, exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing.

that's like saying the CDU in germany is left because CDU voters started voting AfD. people flocking to an even more conservative party does not mean that the original party is somehow left.

Good example. The CDU is in a coalition with the left wing parties and refuses to work with the AfD in any way, not even winning votes with their votes, on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil. So the CDU is indeed not a recognizably right wing party anymore, and has suffered mass defections for that very reason. If it were, it would enter into coalitions with other right wing parties rather than being taking orders from a partly literally called Die Linke.

> on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil

I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.

The AfD has nothing in common with the Nazis.

"Nothing" is a strong word. I'd call it a lie but you probably already know it is.

If you deliberately ignore the well-sourced things in common from the above link, sure.

It's entirely possible to have a right-wing party that still takes the stance "we don't join coalitions with the Nazis".

Within whose party base? If you're saying that the Tories are viewed as too left-wing by Reform voters, then I assume that's true because Reform are further right than the Tories, but so what? If you're saying that Conservative voters find it "controversial" (whatever exactly you mean by that) that Reform is recruiting former Conservative politicians -- well, I'm sure they don't like it, no one likes it when some other party poaches their politicians, but I would like to see your evidence that their dislike is "exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing".

So far as I can make out, here in the UK the near-universal view is that the Conservatives are a centre-right party, Labour are somewhere between a centre-left and a just-plain-centre party (unsurprisingly, people who are further to the left see it as further to the right and vice versa), and Reform are a not-so-centre right party. (People who aren't Reform supporters would mostly describe them as far-right. Not many people like to use that sort of terminology to describe themselves, so people who are Reform supporters would say other things.)

Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party. Likewise, some people further to the left would describe Labour as a centre-right party. I think more people would do that than would describe the Conservatives as centre-left, but that may just reflect the people whose opinions I happen to be most exposed to.

(I mean, specifically, in the UK. Other countries have different overall political leanings. Someone in the US, comparing with the parties there, might accurately describe the Conservative Party as centre-left. But in terms of the UK political landscape: no, of course they are not a centre-left party.)

> Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party

If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

Reform's popularity is driven by the belief that the Conservatives have become so captured by left wing "wets" that they cannot be fixed. Otherwise it makes no sense to split the right, and right wing voters there resisted doing so for a long time. The most commonly cited reason for switching to Reform is a belief that the Tories won't actually enact any right wing policies no matter what they say, and so that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party.

The fact that you believe "pretty much no one other than extreme rightists" has this view and that Labour is seen as a "centrist" party indicates that indeed, your gut feel is correct, and the people you know aren't a representative slice of the population. How many people do you hang out with regularly who read the Telegraph or Daily Mail? Maybe it's none?

If centrism means anything it means trying to adopt mid-way positions that appeal to the majority, but Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down. That's not what centrists do, they chase votes, doubling down is what ideological extremists do. They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.

> If an election were called tomorrow [...] Reform with a massive majority [...] 33% of the vote

(Just remarking in passing on what a terrible electoral system we have in the UK. But, also, precisely because we have this terrible system, it is likely that a lot of the 67% who would prefer Reform not to win would, if there were actually an election tomorrow, vote for parties other than their first preference in the hope of keeping them out. Voters who don't like Reform often really don't like Reform.)

> that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party

Assuming for the sake of argument that it's actually true that 1/3 of voters would vote Reform if there were an election tomorrow (polled voting intentions far away from actual election dates aren't super-reliable) and that all those people agree with Reform about everything, that's 1/3 of the country who are to the right of the Conservatives.

That is not the same thing as 1/3 of the country thinking that the Conservatives are a centre-left party.

(There are plenty of people to the left of the Labour Party but wouldn't call them a centre-right party.)

Also, by your own numbers, we have: 33% to the right of the Conservatives; 17% to the left of the Conservatives; 60% voting for other parties, mostly the Lib Dems and Greens who are also to the left of the Conservatives, typically followed by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, also to the left of the Conservatives, and a few percent of random others most of whom are also to the left of the Conservatives.

A party that is to the right of (let's say) 55% of the electorate is not in any useful sense a centre-left party.

> Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down

This is laughably different from anything that is actually happening. For instance:

> They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration

Here is an instance from each of the last five months of the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wgrv7pwrzo "Sir Keir Starmer has promised the government's new immigration measures will mean net migration falls "significantly" over the next four years." and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-immig... "Sir Keir Starmer unveiled drastic plans to slash migration on Monday (May 2025; these are about the same white paper)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-small... "Sir Keir Starmer has signalled a new hardline approach to tackling illegal immigration by limiting visas for countries which did not do enough to tackle the irregular migration crisis, like taking back failed asylum seekers." (June 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/10/starmer-and-... "Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers but returning others to France." (July 2025)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/04/starmer-hires-of... "Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a £100 million investment in border security which will pay for the NCA to get an additional 300 officers to work on organised immigration crime." (August 2025)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5379djl3o "Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration." (September 2025)

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that these are all things that would please or satisfy your, or the typical Reform voter's, preferences around immigration. I am sure it is true that the Labour Party is less opposed to immigration than you would like it to be. But it is flatly untrue that they would do anything rather than compromise on unlimited mass immigration; if they want unlimited mass immigration at all (which all the evidence suggests they don't) they are compromising on it rather a lot. In other words, doing exactly what you say centrists do and far-leftists don't do.

These are polls asking who people would vote for tomorrow. They're usually pretty accurate. Maybe it's comforting to think that all those people would "really" unite behind a single party to keep Reform out, but there's no sign of that today. It's a wish, not the current situation.

> the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration

Yes, they lie about it because they know it's incredibly unpopular. And then they refuse to do anything that'd actually solve it. That's what non-centrist parties look like. A centrist party would be panicking over their immense unpopularity and trying to actually stake out the center ground with real policy movement.

Your list of links is a good example of my point. In turn:

- Publishing a white paper.

- "Vowing to take tougher action".

- An announcement that didn't have any effect on the ground (there is no one-in-one-out happening in reality).

- A commitment to spend more money! This is at least a believable commitment from them. It's been tried many times before and doesn't work. They know this already.

- An announcement to look at something.

Announcements that they will study the possibility of taking action, one day, possibly, is what it looks like when a government likes a situation the voters don't. Here are some things you didn't include which show their actual position:

- Arguing before the court that the rights of migrants take precedence over the rights of native Brits.

- Saying "of course we do" when an interviewer asks a minister if they really believe that.

> If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

If. But since the Labour government has a massive Labour majority that doesn't have to hold another election until 2029, that's not going to happen any time soon. Four years is a long time in politics.

For non-European readers, Reform are the equivalent of Germany's AfD or France's RN - or America's MAGA. It's a populist culture war party.

In response, far from doubling down, Labour has swung dramatically to the political right (by UK standards) of their normal political position in terms of the culture war issues like immigration and transgender rights that have been driving support for Reform.

We're having bad times in the UK, and no-one likes the incumbent government during bad times. (Never mind that the bad times are largely due to factors beyond their control, as is generally the case until a party has been in power for long enough to start turning the ship.)

Reform, meanwhile, are currently playing on easy mode; voters can say anything they like at the moment, and Reform are picking up the fantasy-football protest vote based on making wild promises they are unlikely to be able to fulfil.

None of this is to say Reform are not a serious threat. But the concept that their victory is inevitable is part their schtick, and should be resisted.

Only if you believe propaganda. What is the sample size of this poll projection, and what are the election policies being put forward for this election ?

It's clear that Labour are unpopular, but an actual election is not something that anyone is thinking about right now, because it is so far out. Reform would like to suggest they are, but they have yet to show any actual policies other than the usual right-wing rhetoric that may be populist but doesn't fix anything.

Shouting loudly like certain Americans, and pretending you have answers, may be good for headlines, but doesn't convince many real voters.

Sample size for that poll was 2615, about normal or a little bigger than normal for a voting intentions poll in the UK. The people being asked who they'd vote for in the next election are thinking about it, at least. Reform announced specific legislative policies on immigration at a large press event just recently.

> modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.

Ahh and there we are. It's the immigrant's fault. Once all those illegals are out the of the country we'll be great again - the world will once more bend to Queen Victoria's will and Bobby Charleston will again lift the world cup for England, it's rightful owners (hard /s btw).

No major party on either side of the Atlantic are pro-illegal immigration or advocating unlimited mass immigration (or anything close to unlimited).

I didn't pass any judgement on that policy, nor blame immigrants for anything. I only observed that it's a deeply unpopular policy across the political spectrum yet they won't abandon it because it's seen as non-negotiable by a small class of very left wing people.

Labour following their desires instead of trying to boost their polling numbers isn't "centrism" by any definition.

The regulator (Ofwat) also deserves a great deal of the blame. They determine the maximum prices that water companies can charge. Since the start of privatisation, they have prioritised low bills above all else and are proud of the fact that water bills fell by 45% in real terms between 1989 and 2020. The consequences are obvious - the supposed "efficiency" that pays for those lower bills inevitably means neglecting maintenance and reducing infrastructure investment. The short-term thinking that has led to this situation has been dictated by government, not shareholders.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the planning system is also a huge obstacle to infrastructure investment, with numerous important projects being blocked due to spurious environmental concerns.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/687dfcc4312ee...

A lot of this is (imo) a desire to keep juicing returns - often encouraged by things like pension funds, which happily look the other way.

The economy always goes through these cycles - people find a way to scam/‘extract economic value’ from something no one is worried about at the time. They weren’t worried at the time, because it was well run and ‘what is the worst that can happen’.

Over time, what was working well gets blown up as part of the resource extraction, leading to the thing being a giant expensive scandal now.

The issue starts getting resolved - in the case of a public service often by necessary price increases because of stuff that wore out/deferred maintenance/disasters caused by the prior situation. If it’s a private company, bankruptcy.

Eventually, even the dumbest of the population realizes the prior attitude was wrong and they got scammed. The thing starts maybe not being terrible for awhile.

Scammers move onto another part of the economy as people are looking for them now.

After a generation or so, people forget. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If a country can't afford to maintain it's infrastructure it's a failed country.

Very little in our world was designed to do what we need it do 50 years later. It's unlikely that anyone will even know what our needs 50 years from today will be. This is why the expectation is that systems we build will be constantly maintained, upgraded, modified, expanded, and redesigned as needed and with the next several decades in mind (to the best of our ability).

It's what we've always done with all infrastructure and even our cities themselves. Neglecting things like sewer systems until they are overwhelmed, failing, and prohibitively expensive to fix isn't inevitable. It's just bad governance. It doesn't matter if it's private companies or governments, neglecting infrastructure so that a few people can line their own pockets until the situation becomes critical should be criminal, but at the very least nobody should accept them throwing their hands up and saying it's just too expensive to fix now.

But "investment" as the water companies define it is every penny not taken as profit. Staffing costs? Investment! Fixing leaks? Investment! So that figure sounds like money above and beyond, but I don't think it is.

The 250bn figure is one pushed by the private owners, trying to defend their high yields. It's likely inflated with bonuses and short term schemes to juice returns. Meanwhile, they've extracted 85bn in dividends since privatization began. Privatizing them cost approx 7.6bn - that's a 12x return over less then 40 years. Pretty nice if you can get it.

These systems were built at a time when the country was much poorer. It can afford to replace it.

Sweden's conservative government are pressuring building regulators to re-evaluate whether "all rooms require windows" in order to make the construction of apartments cheaper.

"Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows" was my first thought when I read that in my turn of the century starter apartment with giant windows in every room.

Like, GDP and productivity has tripled since that apartment was last renovated, let alone constructed. The idea that we can't afford a 20th century living standard anymore is nothing but absurdist propaganda.

<< Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows

No - just bring back window taxes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

That's a good thing to re-evaluate. The government shouldn't dictate people's preferences. People's lifestyles have changed. It's now normal for this generation of people to prefer a dark cave-like room where they play video games and socialize online. Glare from windows restrict where monitors could be placed. If they want natural light, they would prefer to go outside for a walk or a hike.

And that's not to mention rooms like kitchens and bathrooms. Older houses invariably have windows for kitchens too since you need to open the windows to let out the fumes from gas cooking. And they would have windows in the bathroom to let out moisture. These days newer houses are already designed not to have windows in either kitchens or bathrooms.

Sweden is very green and comparatively car free. Having open windows during summer to let in light, fresh air and bird sound is culturally strong here.

You can buy curtains, you can't retroactively insert a window as easily nor should you have to my lord.

I can't imagine living in a dark, centrally ventilated container. Most Swedes agree (massive pushback when this happened, gov backtracked).

No, you are right. It is absurd. The same government also increased the income tax deduction on renovations both in percentage and amount.

So is the suggestion of less light and more isolation in Sweden. One of the darkest and most lonely countries in the world. There is already no requirement for windows in bathrooms and kitchens, as you can't regularly open windows in winter anyway.

They were largely also built when planning wasn't a concern. Can you imagine the city of Birmingham being able to just buy land and building resevoirs in Wales and viaducting it all to the city today? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elan_Valley_Reservoirs

These systems were built when the nation could build. That capability has been significantly diminished. London's equivalent to Paris' RER costs north of 1 billion pounds per mile.

The UK doesn't have enough lawyers or legal infrastructure in general to handle that kind of case load!

> The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today

I am not British, but this is confusing. Was private capital forced to take on the burden of privatizing the water system? Or did private investors err in their economic analysis? (Or did those investors just assume the problems would happen long after they personally had gotten paid?)

They’ve being paying out dividends and bonuses while running up debt and not investing in infrastructure. Some of these companies are already worthless on paper. Clearly they intend to make as much as possible and then walk away.

They placed a bet on the government allowing water prices to rise to match the level of investment needed, and lost that bet.

I mean, all the more reason it shouldn't be privatised. If it only makes sense to have one of something (road network, water system) it's a natural monopoly, _and_ it's going to require large public investment to be maintained, why wouldn't you in-house the expertise needed to do that and avoid the shareholder dividends overhead?

The overhead of having shareholders in this case is minimal. The profits they make are small, but having a goal of making profits does create discipline in resource usage.

The water system is like the electricity system. It's perfectly possible to have inflows and outflows be fully private, as long as the government keeps its hands off the pricing. The network itself can also be run privately, as both supplier and buyers want supplies to flow. The trick is to ensure there are numerous different companies with the expertise to maintain pipework and then allow local communities to quickly change to different contractors.

This is why the state owned company structure exists. The board and management are correctly incentivized and the profit can be reinvested if necessary. No parasites.

You need a counterbalance to efficient resource use, usually competition ensures they don't skimp, that doesn't work with natural monopolies.

Kind of shows how toxic things have become in our culture when people need to be bribed with profits to provide the basics necessary for a society to function, instead of just being incentivized by wanting a functioning society.

Cynically, if you’re someone trying to make a lot of money, why wouldn’t you take a well run system, convince people they can save a bunch of money by ‘cutting waste’, then pocket as much money as you can by cutting long term maintenance and pocketing the difference - and when it blows up, sell them the solution at inflated prices too?

It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior.

Eventually people figure it out (maybe) and go all fire and pitchforks - but that sounds like a problem for ‘future me’ eh?

And if you’re good at structuring everything, maybe they’ll never even have anyone concrete to blame but themselves! (Classic referendum/politician behavior there)

I can't understand the perspective of those who defend privatizing natural monopolies. I'm not against privatization in any way, but good governance is impossible without consequences for failure.

Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.

Notably, public utilities are often seen as ‘above consequences’ too when part of the gov’t, since usually governments make it impossible to sue them or give them real consequences either.

In theory, with privatization the gov’t can arrest people or the like. The gov’t very rarely does that to itself.

Politicians can be swapped out of course, but most smart ones setup scape goats and a lot of levels of abstraction so they can claim successes and point the finger elsewhere if it goes wrong.

My point is the differences you're postulating are a rounding error in the scale of the problem in front of you.

> Taken together, the fall in shareholders' investment and retained earnings - or profit - and rising dividend payments mean that, according to the University of Greenwich, owners have withdrawn £85.2bn. > > — BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo)

It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.

It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off

So where has the profit, paid as bonuses to executives and shareholders, come from? The UK water companies were paid extra to fix the infrastructure and the cash paid by the public has increased.

That's according to the water companies though, you've taken those figures directly from water UK, an industry run company:

https://www.water.org.uk/about-us/our-board

We must look at the reality more critically.

We already know that the investment is open to profit extraction, the companies doing the work are owned by the same investors and there's low oversight, they have occasionally been caught using inflated prices. We don't know the extent though as OFWAT has been criticized for only really catching the really obvious ones.

All that investment is our own money, it's now apparent they've not taken on debt to pay for that investment. They claim they have, but it's now turned out that they've taken on that debt simply to pay for dividends to shareholders. Debt is around £60 billion, while share holder dividends over the years are about £80 billion (this figure varies depending on who you believe, but it's always higher than the debt). And that's without accounting for the inflated cost of "investment".

And that debt is now apparently tax-payer guaranteed because it's all to people who are too big to fail.

So they've basically made off with £20 billion in 35 years, plus however untold billions in profits from related companies in "investment", and we've got a water crisis developing, constant sewage discharge into rivers, etc.

>Cumulative capital investment

Now divide that by C-suite wages + monies paid as profits.

Well the estimated industry profits of ~£20B pa over the last 30+ years would have got us some way to replacing the worst of the sewage system. Instead that money went to yachts and pushing up rental costs, or whatever.

isnt the cost of not fixing it > trillions of dollars?

And yet we are still in this position in the UK. Flip the question: What were the dividends paid out by the companies over the same time period? Assuming they gave out $100bn in dividend, then we wasted money that should have been spent on more infrastructure.

This assumes a parity in government efficiency. A bit laughable innit?

That says more about the British people than it does about the ability of a government to be efficient.

So basically that £250bn is a bullshit figure, how long is a piece of string? It sounds big but it's meaningless.

By definition every penny of profit always comes at someone's expense but I don't think we'd advocate for nationalising Tesco's?

That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors. They are motivated to do things to get more customers. Yes, there are many cases where supermarkets have been bad actors, but that's solvable with competition regulation. Water service is very different, and the current setup in the UK seems pretty insane - you can't have competition on who supplies water to your house. People aren't going to move location because of the quality of the water supply until things get very bad. They are motivated to spend as little as possible.

You can set up a system where companies are involved in the delivery of water in a way that let's them compete. For example, national entity owns the pipes and needs to provide a given service, companies compete for pipe maintenance, IT services, etc. It's hardly difficult to think up a system that is mostly free market and better in every way than what the people from the UK have to suffer through.

Railways are another example of competition not being possible and where privatisation makes no sense.

Competition is possible, it just is rarely worth it. NYC subways worked fairly well as a competitive system until the city started passing maximum price laws (which in turn meant they couldn't maintain the system and eventually the city took it over). However the competition meant redundant service to the dense areas as each built there, at the expense of less dense areas that should have got service. It also meant that where lines did cross each other (a complex task even in 3d) they generally didn't built transfers even though a single system would have.

The claim competition is not possible is therefor false. We can debate if we want it, but it is incorrect to claim it cannot work.

Competition in rail does exist in the UK and privatization turned around the network's fortunes. The ridership graph is very clear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Traffic dropped a lot in the Great Depression but stabilized immediately after, and remained stable right up until nationalization in 1948 at which point the network entered a period of continuous decline, eventually falling to a level of ridership last seen in 1865. That is a staggering failure.

The moment the railways were privatized ridership starts going up again, despite the privatization not being complete and being unable to roll back the huge damage done under the decades of state ownership (before nationalization the railway companies were entirely self sufficient, which they no longer are).

So to argue that privatization makes "no sense" you have to ignore the fact that when privately managed usage of the railways goes up and when run by the state it goes down. If the goal of the railway is to be used, then it does make sense.

> That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors.

Except when they merge/consolidate and say they can find savings (which of course will be passed onto consumers) through "efficiencies" and "synergies".

Thus my comment about competition regulation.

Tesco's is infrastructure?

You've heard of "food" I assume?

If "food" were a singular universally used product, and units of food were totally interchangeable I'd say that food should be treated like a utility. Instead there's a lot of different types of food from ultra-processed crap that's sat on a shelf for years to whole/fresh foods and everything from the skill of the manufacturer/baker/chef to the quality of the ingredients used will result in massive differences in the food and its costs.

That isn't really the case with water and power (or even internet access). Water is water. Electricity is Electricity. There's no artisanal organic Electricity made from the finest ingredients that powers your stuff any better. You either have a safe, functioning product or it isn't. Everyone needs the exact same stuff, it makes sense for the government to supply it. Not everyone needs, or even wants, the same foods.

Not normally considered infrastructure.

Food distribution networks might be infrastructure, but POS stores aren't, generally. Drinking water supplies are infrastructure; drinking fountains aren't.

The infrastructure is the whole thing, right? When I say tesco I don't mean the shops!

Food production is largely nationalised due to heavy subsidies provided to farmers. Different countries have different policies here, but in my country of Australia it meets the definition of a nationalised industry by everything but name.

Food distribution as not, and again in my country we are having constant investigations into monopolistic anti consumer behaviour by the large supermarkets.

they sell water, too!

>> When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public

I too am a customer of PG&E.

Powerful argument for such to be operated as co-operatives if ownership by a non-government entity is called for.

My provider of water is Thames Water. In the past 10 years, they did cumulative turnover £18,107 turnover, and profit -£1,180. So they in fact operate with a negative margin -6.52%.

In the UK, owning a utility company is nothing easy. Shareholders are definitely not stuffing their pockets. The biggest owner is Ontario pension fund (32%). I guess, poor retired Canadians are not very happy about this investment.

So I would say, your framing sounds interesting, until one digs deeper into facts.

I think that this might be some useful context.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/30/in-charts-h...

Overall the debt held by the company has ballooned since the 90s, meanwhile large dividend payments went out to shareholders. This appears to be extraction of value out of Thames Water (TW).

It's hard to see those graphs and then take TW seriously when they complain they need money for investment.

Utilities are very capital-intensive and lining money incurs interest. If you let the state run utilities you will also pay profits in the form of the interest for bonds. The government pays lower rates, but there’s a strong push to keep government debts down while private debts are mostly ignored.

I agree with you in my heart, but I'm worried we both could be overlooking something important, so let me steel-man an argument against:

You said correctly that the private utility monopolist can choose from the menu of raising prices, delivering a subpar (cheaper) service for the same price, or can "defer" (aka skip) maintenance indefinitely. All ways they can extract cash to pay shareholders or even worse, pay management fees to private equity.

But the government-owned utility that we idealize, which provides the reasonable service at a breakeven price, may not be realistic. Government has its own incentives: Some politicians want to take funding from your utility to pay for their pet project. Others (political operatives or even civil servants) may sneak in a corrupt overpriced contract to benefit their corrupt associates. Public unions are known for negotiating unreasonable work rules and contracts that preserve jobs that are not actually needed.

All of the above together create a drain on finances of a government-owned utility, which is the public counterpart of the drain on finances that "the need to make a profit for the owners" places on investor-owned utilities.

I hate my local investor-owned utilities with a fiery passion and can't believe most governments could do worse, but I think we shouldn't overlook how easy it is for nationalized entities to engage in similar amounts of shenanigans.

What's worse is how hard it is to create political urgency around invisible decay

The concept of reservoirs and emergency supply seems to be completely at odds with privatisation. What private company is going to spend loads of money to build deep reservoirs that are stressed only once every 5 or 10 years. None. They're going to reach for an immediate supply like a river or aquifer and then raise prices if those sources run low. It's insane to plan out infrastructure on the belief that private companies are capable of building such large buffers.

I'm inclined to agree that privatisation is bad for long term planning, but the history of the Abingdon Reservoir proposal seems to be counter evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir

Looks like Thames Water (a private company) proposed the development nearly 20 years ago, but it was turned down by the Environment Agency, a government body.

> Plans for a £1bn reservoir in Oxfordshire to supply more than eight million people over the next 25 years have been rejected by the government.

> Thames Water wants to build a site on four square miles of land near Abingdon to help ensure future demand is met.

> The bid went to a public inquiry but the secretary of state said there was "no immediate need" for such a site.

"Abingdon £1bn reservoir plan rejected by government"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-12651131

Good find, I admit I had jumped on the Thames Water is Evil bandwagon, and for the record they are evil, but in this case they have been out-eviled by that other driver of British societal regression:

> Campaigners had fought the plan, claiming there was no need for such a large reservoir and that it would damage the environment.

> Leader of the Vale of White Horse Council Tony de Vere said: "We are delighted with this decision.

> "Local residents were very worried about the impact of such a large reservoir and we share their relief that the plan has been axed."

I have friends in the Abingdon area and the primary objection, from what they've told me, is that locals objected to a reservoir that would mainly be used to supply London. Little Englanders at their worst.

And that's when parliament should step in and pass it as standalone infrastructure under its own bill.

Yeah but don’t forget all the eminent domain shit that happened in the 70s and destroyed neighbourhoods left and right. The power structure set up to make sure that doesn’t happen again are now impeding important progress.

Thanks I'm going to have to look this up. Sounds interesting.

They don't object to London subsidising their "rural" lifestyle and paying their pensions though. I despise these people.

> Local residents were very worried about the impact of such a large reservoir

Was it the crocodiles or the immigrants in small boats in the reservoir they worried about most?

Snarkiness aside, this is Oxfordshire. One of 'the' most unlikely areas to have been concerned about that as the primary opinion driver.

Reservoirs are nice, aren't they? Nice to look at, swim in, kayak on, walk around etc. Unless your house is going to be flooded, of course.

Agreed! I have a few around me, and to be honest I didn't even realise they were there for a few years until I really started exploring the area on foot. They are lovely.

So I don't know what the objections were about. You can easily ignore them, and just as easily enjoy them. But they are hardly going to "destroy the environment".

That said, they would of course destroy "some" environment. I'm not aware of the specific objections in this case. So I'll leave an open mind until I do.

The Oxford Clarion has had several posts about the proposed Abingdon damn:

https://oxfordclarion.uk/water-why-abingdons-mega-reservoir-...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-is-there-an-alte...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-what-are-the-ris...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-how-much-will-it...

Privatisation should be accompanied with legal responsibility to build/maintain infrastructure for the future. If a government agency blocks the development, this liability should shift to them, to disincentivise unnecessarily blocking development.

But for something like water supply, there should be more competition via legally mandated unbundling, like with Internet service providers and energy suppliers who use the same delivery infrastructure while competing with each other.

> Thames Water's computer-generated image of how the reservoir would look

We have come a long way in computer generated images in 14 years.

Ah but this is an argument against private ownership.

The ultimate power, including violence, lies with the federal government. Thames water can't shoot dead protesters or council members but the government definitely can and will.

Not surprised by this since the parent comments "30 years" in general seem to coincide with the timeframe when we stopped building in the west in general.

> It's insane to plan out infrastructure on the belief that private companies are capable of building such large buffers

You can make this a requirement by law.

Or create an economic incentive for it and let the market do the rest.

I tend to favor that approach instead because it allows more room for innovation and makes it much easier to quantify exactly how much you're spending by distorting the market in that way.

We're talking about the industry that just finished Thames Tideway, fully privately financed? A project that will last for at least 100 years and probably longer? A project that was needed for decades but was ignored by government and only got built thanks to the private sector?

The idea private companies don't invest is just Labour propaganda. Another commenter has already pointed out your belief about reservoirs is wrong, as is the idea they wouldn't make other forms of investment.

And all this has happened despite the government imposing socialist price controls on the industry, a move usually guaranteed to kill investment!

Here in Ireland, our water is a public service and we have similar supply issues to the UK (and a similar rainy climate). I'm not discounting your analysis and I'm sure there are lots of other variables but it's always good to compare other outcomes when discussing counterfactuals.

Irish Water/Uisce Éireann have delivered on two new reservoirs in the last few years: Saggart and Stillorgan (technically a rebuild of an 1860s open reservoir). A third, Peamount, is in the planning stage. All of these are around Dublin, the driest and most populated area. Perhaps there are more, their website doesn't make it easy to find them. We still get hosepipe bans, occasional pressure reductions, and frequent "boil notices".

At the other end of the pipe they have opened/upgraded many waste water treatment plants recently too, large EU fines being a motivator, including one in Arklow which took nearly 4 decades to get over the line (its planning predating the existence of IW).

It's a fair point that nationalised water industries can also be poorly run. But I'm not sure what the argument is that means the amount of money that privatised UK water companies have paid in dividends vs. invested in maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't a significant part of the UK's problems.

However, as a further point. If national priorities change then a nationalised water industry can respond (relatively) quickly. But what can be done with a bunch of potentially foreign owned profit-seeking companies?

Paying dividends is good. It's how you attract the capital for investment without having to raise it via sale of government bonds or money printing.

The problem here is financial illiteracy - the alternative to paying dividends isn't that the same money all gets spent on the water network. Large scale investment is rarely funded from general revenues as it'd require spending years accumulating a huge cash pile that sits around doing nothing, and governments see such piles as pigs to slaughter. So the alternative is that the government borrows the money and then has to pay interest on it. From your perspective the UK "wastes" 8% of its spending on interest payments, and it's rising rapidly, but of course if it didn't pay interest then nobody would lend it money and all funds would have to either come from taxes or via inflation.

Government bonds are considered lower risk and the interest rate is lower, i.e they will attract the same money for less. Private shareholders are more expensive.

This also doesn't consider "debt recapitalisation" where these private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers and then suck out dividend cash "de-risking" their holding in the company. The government can bail it out or the can close it then, it's not their problem as they received the cash upfront.

Government bonds are only low risk in economic theory. In real world practice lending to left wing countries can be high risk as they like to accumulate too much debt and then default. That's why the UK government is paying 5.8% on its bonds at the moment despite being able to print its own money, which is the same average interest rate paid by Thames Water. Lending to Thames is not seen as riskier than lending to the state, despite that Thames faces huge regulatory constraints like price controls and the British government can literally force people to give it all their money.

> private companies draw down new debt on promise of future cash inflows from consumers

This is what governments do too.

It's interesting it's at the same rate, I imagine as everyone knows the government would have to bail them out. So the question remains why do it? It doesn't actually benefit the general public then. Increased risk for government and like you mentioned increased hurdles for running the utility.

Of course government do that, but they're left holding the bag regardless, so the incentive is very different.

These are not counterpoints.

Why do what? Have private water companies? Same reason for having private food supply, private electricity providers, private communication providers, and in most countries private healthcare providers. They run the business better than the state would, which is itself a benefit to the public.

A government bailout means nationalization, which means investors lose everything. That risk doesn't suppress interest rates, it increases them. Thames Water's interest costs are around average for corporate debt, implying the market doesn't anticipate a water nationalization anytime soon.

Unlike the others this is a natural monopoly.

Your first message contradicts your second, which one is it are they paying government risk level interest rates or business risk level interest rates.

Edit: I just went and looked up their rating with one of the big agencies. CCC rated (junk basically) with a negative outlook, they did get an upgrade on a refinance last year, but from CC (so now lesser junk).

UK's last rating was AA (if you're interested).

There's no contradiction. Thames and gilts both pay ~5.8% on average. This is about the same as "Baa" (moderate risk) corporate debt.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAA

Thames' debt costs are normal for a company of its type, but for a government this bond yield is danger-level high. That's why there's so much talk in financial circles now about the UK needing another IMF bailout, although I have grave doubts about whether that's actually possible given the sheer size of the UK's debt load compared to the smaller third world countries that normally need IMF help, and the near simultaneous talk in France of a bailout there too. The IMF just doesn't have the resources for even one bailout of that size, let alone two.

Don't pay attention to credit ratings of countries vs companies. They aren't comparable due to political interference and general crapitude at the ratings agencies (remember they rated sub-prime mortgage debt as AAA). They also disagree, S&P rates Thames' class A bonds as Caa3. What really matters is the yield. That's the ground truth.

Note that Thames' interest costs have been all over the place. 5.8% is the current amount it's paying, but the actual bonds it has issued have had a wide range of yields.

The reason it's considered high for a government is because government debt should be much lower risk than a company. Governments can order banks to transfer everyone's savings to themselves, they can print money, they can prevent their citizens from leaving and seize all the assets... they can do things to raise money that would be considered incredibly evil and criminal if companies tried. And of course they can in principle set bond yields to whatever level they like by making the central bank or other financial institutions legally required to buy their debt.

That's why economics textbooks teach that government bonds are the lowest risk possible and so should have yields far below corporate debt.

In reality:

1. Governments can default on their debts just like companies do. History is full of such examples. Bond yields reflect that fact.

2. Governments can sell bonds that are inflation linked, so printing money isn't a way to escape those debts. The UK has an abnormally high amount of such debt that's inflation linked. The only way to pay them back is via cutting spending or increasing tax revenue, but the UK can't do the latter (recent tax rises have failed to come close to expected revenue increases) and can't do the former either because...

3. Governments can be prevented from paying their debts by law. Some countries have "debt brakes" or "debt ceilings" that can block the issuance of new debt to pay old debt, and in other cases (like the UK) the government may rely on ideologically extreme MPs who refuse to pass laws that bring spending in line with revenues.

So you add these things together and something that could in principle be a sure bet ends up looking as risky as an ordinary company.

Given that ratings agencies were brought up it's worth adding a bit more detail here.

Thames' debt is C-grade because it recently defaulted on its debt. How is that possible given that its debt servicing costs are not unusually high? Normally you'd expect interest costs to go up well before default. Well, on the surface level because it couldn't raise more money from investors to meet rising costs. It couldn't do that because Ofwat keep fining it for "underperformance" whilst also refusing to allow prices to catch up with where they used to be in the past. Investors refused to put more money in unless a 40% price rise was allowed by the government, but the government likes to boast it has forced prices 45% lower since the 1980s (in real terms). Government doesn't budge, investors go on strike = default = downgrade.

There was waste under state ownership but probably not half of every pound spent, which is what forcing prices to nearly halve would have required.

Under the Tories it seems to have been believed by investors that eventually Ofwat would be reigned in and the financial pressure on UK water companies would ease. That didn't happen, instead the Tories imploded and Labour won. Both ratings agencies say explicitly that this is the reason they consider Thames' outlook to be either stable (at best) or negative:

"We revised down our assessment of TWUL's business risk profile to satisfactory because we now consider that U.K. water companies will operate in a less supportive regulatory environment"

Less supportive regulatory environment is ratings-speak for "because we think the left will shaft Thames and its investors".

This outcome is the opposite of the fantasy being peddled in this thread where investors have been extracting great wealth from Britain. It's the opposite: investors are getting hosed by the government. They're literally losing the money they put into Thames Water because the government forced Thames to spend it all on making water artificially cheap in an unsustainable manner.

Again Thanks, extremely interesting insight.

I'm not sure they're entirely to blame although I'm sure they've played their part.

Look at the shareholding changes (2011-2017 Macquarie) and dividend payout percentage. It seems the current shareholders were left holding the bag, and perhaps we should be pointing fingers at Macquarie. When they left the debt had been increased by £2bln. If you look at their dividend payout ratio, in most of the years it held the investment, this ratio is extraordinarily high. Perhaps they sucked this dry, necessitating a price increase. (Current shareholders have barely paid anything).

Capital expenditure has been flat, only really increasing in 2021-2024. Perhaps chickens coming home to roost?

Very interesting thanks.

You're welcome!

It really highlights that governance, long-term strategy, and actual follow-through matter just as much as the ownership model

> Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water.

State ownership is not a panacea either.

State owned Scottish Water has more sewer leaks than the privatised companies in England and Wales do.

The responsibility to look after the citizens basic needs such as water is on the government. Not private for-profit companies.

If they can't do their job, then we shouldn't pay our taxes ?

You could say the same argument about food, but the system of privately owned farms moving food via privately owned logistics companies to privately owned grocery shops works very well. Yes, it's the responsibility of the state that it's citizens can acquire their needs, but that doesn't mean it has to be government owned.

The difference being that farmers and logistics companies and shops work in a competitive market where as water in a natural monopoly.

The system does not work perfectly though. In the UK big supermarkets have monopsony power over farmers and smaller farmers are being squeezed out by big farm owners (who tend to have lower standards, especially of animal welfare).

Giving how much subsidies farmers get, and they still whine all the fucking time, I would gladly nationalize them all.

Corn ethanal? Gone. Crazy EU stuff? Gone.

Collectivised agriculture has gone badly enough often enough that I'm wouldn't risk trying it.

I don't think the Soviet and Chinese examples are very relevant, because dealing with a bunch of peasents is extraordinary different from dealing with an agricultural sector that is already industrialized.

Because the massive subsidies we already have the incentive problems too, so it's not like that would be a new can of worms either.

This seems to be working well and is resilient www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjIdnnE

Subsidies are certainly mismanaged in numerous ways but they are the only alternative to the granary system to maintain reliable and stable food production. We used the granary system for thousands of years across the world and while it kind of worked, it also resulted in numerous famines across every culture.

Just trying to learn more. What "Crazy EU stuff" are being farmed at the moment?

> Yes, it's the responsibility of the state that it's citizens can acquire their needs, but that doesn't mean it has to be government owned.

Absolutely agree, it may not need to be government owned, however it should absolutely be government funded.

> the system of privately owned farms moving food via privately owned logistics companies to privately owned grocery shops works very well.

Does it? Food prices are up, millions of people rely on food banks [0], etc. This may not be entirely down to farms or the governmental oversight thereof, but food security is not a given.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/09/britons-vuln...

Likewise, if it's nationalised, poor water management should result in different voting behaviour, particularly in favor of parties that will improve it.

But I think the other issue there is that for the past 30 years, there hasn't been an issue with the water supply; it's invisible when it's working well, so it doesn't get attention during voting season.

More realistically, if they can't do their job, vote their bosses out of office. The bosses might be a level up from the administration, but someone elected has power to appoint and fire, surely.

As a counter point, go look at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It's a publicly owned municipal utility and is notorious for its corruption. The DWP doesn't perform any maintenance, lettings things break completely and then having to fix huge issues. They were the group who failed to fill a reservoir in the Pacific Palisades to save some money where firefighters weren't able to use to fight the fires.

Ideally, the dwp is accountable to the city, and therefore to voters and the state, in a way that a private company profoundly is not.

It's fine.

Water companies will build new resevoir capacity, but since the extra money they already bill your for, for maintaining the infrastructure, has been paid out to shareholders, it will of course require an additional fee on your bill.

At least that has been my experience with everything privatized in the past couple of decades. The private investors scoop up every bit of value, and when it's time to pay the bill, it's the customers that must pay (again).

Fortunately we have regulations in place, but that doesn't help when all value has been siphoned from the company and all there's left is debt.

Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it.

And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.

I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.

10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.

The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.

Waste and inefficiency should be stomped out, but it doesn't need to be ground down into a fine dust and then vaporized into nothingness. A little bit of waste is fine. You want slack in your system in case of emergencies.

The problem with that attitude is that waste isn't that easy to define:

- what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment.

- what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal

- cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste

- some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste.

With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers.

Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ.

That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.

The "waste" argument is standard neoliberal nonsense. There are very few situations where the private sector provides a better service for less money. (See also the UK's NHS, which still provides a very efficient - if increasingly broken - service, while being starved of cash.)

Like most neoliberal nonsense, it's not just a lie, it's a misdirection. What it really means is "Government money is being spent on providing a service for poor people, when it should be handed out to rich people."

It's driven by entitlement, not generosity.

You can see this very clearly in the way privatised CEOs are paid. The water companies quite obviously and literally prioritise CEO pay rises and dividends over service quality.

That's not an accident. It's the true meaning of privatisation.

That is what privatisation is.

The "customer" in privatised industries isn't the public, it's upper management and other big shareholders.

"There are very few situations where the private sector provides a better service for less money"

The issue is when there is a monopoly. When you have a government monopoly of a specific industry, it's going to be poor. If the same thing happens in private industry, it's a similar outcome. There is no competition with the government, because they play by rules that makes it impossible to compete as a private business, so it's by default, a monopoly.

When companies compete, it's always better for the customer. Government run Internet (which is what we had before it was commercialized), was stuck in the same place for decades, with no innovation. It's pretty much universal and relatively cheap now.

In the US, you can look at the post office and private companies like UPS and Fedex. I used to run a business for almost a decade where I would ship out 100s of packages/week. The post office always had poor service compared to the rest...and the cost ended up being comparable. If you lost a package? with the post office, there was no real way to get your money back.

There's waste with government-run services because they never have to really worry about profit or losing money. Every government-run service I've ever used has been inefficient.

Is the NHS "starved for money"? I don't disagree that it's verging on collapse, but they keep giving it more and more money. The budget goes up, both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00...

How much would be enough? 15% of GDP, 20%, 50%?

I'm generally in favour of public services over ruthless privatization but I don't understand how Britain is to survive as a nation of nurses and pensioners supported by a tax base of Uber Eats riders.

You're not taking into account how hard it is to get regulatory/planning approval to build anything in Britain.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

Responsible for putting a pin in development and turning Britain into a museum, with insufficient water or power.

It should urgently be reformed.

It shouldn’t be considered a source of profit at all, attractive or not. Water is a fundamental resource for human life. We pay bills to ensure the infrastructure is there to provide it.

If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.

At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.

Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.

> privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity

Of course not. The water company was in terrible shape (read: lacking funds) before it was dumped on a commercial company that does not have deep pockets like Chevron. Thames Water owes £16.8 billion. That money is already gone.

No one is going to swoop in to save the day. Taxpayers will eat the bill, and invest even more to reverse decades of neglect. All of those hard decisions labour committed to make are unnecessary when nothing is done and they are made for you. The country has limited funds, and is spending funds it doesn't have on things like billions on hotels for 29,000 unauthorized travelers so far this year.

UK external debt is £2.7 trillion, and whats her name said yesterday it may be necessary to ask the IMF for a loan? Water company indeed.

> privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources

Why does privatisation mean that the government can't build infrastructure? I think the answer is more likely nimbyism than privatisation.

I personally think it makes no sense to privatise infrastructure for which no competition can reasonably take place, and I'd include distribution networks of many sorts in that: water distribution, rail lines, electricity distribution.

But I'm not aware that privatisation means that the state can't take on reservoir projects. The problem is that development of all kinds in the UK is utterly crippled by nimbyism. The article mentions the proposed Abingdon reservoir but links it to the boogyman of data centres rather than call out what the picture obviously shows: it's being stalled by nimbys.

Case in point, Thames Water has been trying to build a reservoir in Oxfordshire since 2006[1], but has only met resistance by the local planning authority and environmental campaigners (the two often working in concert when it comes to NIMBYism due to various statutory obligations placed on local authorities.)

A few months ago the government reclassified the project as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project to allow Thames Water to to take the proposal out of the hands of the local authority, potentially allowing the project to go ahead. [2]

If it goes ahead as planned it will be the second largest reservoir in the UK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9kp2d4d0vo

"Privatisation" does not preclude government investment in infrastructure.

"Thatcherism" does, however. It is a warped [Ayn] Randian view of capitalism and those who drive it. State intervention into the machinery of capital, even when it comes to essential infrastructure, is considered a corrupting influence.

Nobody able to change national policy within Downing Street or even ministries in Whitehall, at the time - or since - has had the gumption to say it's not working and we need to do something about it.

You are however right, that NIMBYism has also worked remarkably well - the planning process in the UK is the reason we can't build HS2 cheaply or quickly, and that is relatively painless compared to wind farms, solar farms (also often blocked), never mind building a dam and flooding an entire valley, which was the old way of creating new capacity.

I think you are misrepresenting Thatcherism. Thatcher was pretty pragmatic and did not want to privatise everything - e.g. Royal Mail and the Post Office - those were done by the very non-Thatcherite coalition government in 2013. They were also messed up (e.g. private ownership of the postcode database).

https://www.ft.com/content/1057f722-75d5-11e1-9dce-00144feab...

A lot of NHS privatisation was done by Blair and Brown - especially to facilitate Brown's use of off-balance sheet debt to fund spending while pretending the government was not increasing national debt.

A lot of privatisations were a good idea. I think most people would agree the government should not own oil companies, airlines, car manufacturers, steel manufacturers, or telecoms, etc. I think the mistakes need to be seen against the backdrop of a necessary correction of a lot of nationalisation.

The problem has also been regulatory. Why were water companies not required to build capacity? Why were they allowed to borrow in order to pay shareholders? This was all entirely foreseeable.

I think the problem is not an ideology, but the lack of a coherent ideology. Privatisation has become an end in itself, backed by politicians who do not seem to understand that its not a magic bullets, and there is no incentive for efficiency in the absence of competition. A private monopoly is usually worse than a state monopoly unless very closely regulated.

> I think most people would agree the government should not own oil companies, airlines, car manufacturers, steel manufacturers, or telecoms, etc.

People are starting to revisit the idea that oil and steel manufacture should at least be held domestically, if not run by the government outright, given the current geopolitical situation. Let's talk straight: if China and India would close down export for steel, or if OPEC decides to repeat the 70s... the Western world is fucked. And yes, that includes America, because most US refineries need OPEC oil for chemical composition reasons. The US is only net positive on oil imports and exports, it is by far not self sufficient. Add in a major war, we'd not be able to produce ammo, much less vehicles, even if we somehow found enough staff to man the plants.

As for telecoms: the base infrastructure should belong to the government. That is a lesson we in Germany are learning at the moment...

> And yes, that includes America, because most US refineries need OPEC oil for chemical composition reasons.

I think you got that backwards, Venezuela needs US refineries because of chemical composition reasons. North America as a whole is self-sufficient.

> People are starting to revisit the idea that oil and steel manufacture should at least be held domestically

Oh good, lets push the inflation button even harder. I can only hope steel manufacture can someday be as efficient and competitive as US boat building.

> I can only hope steel manufacture can someday be as efficient and competitive as US boat building.

Better have expensive boats than no boats, particularly when preparing to wage war with a country that can be reached either by air - which means either missiles or nuclear bombers - or by water, the only option allowing for conventional warfare.

That's the thing we all have to prepare for, the inevitable confrontation with China.

In any case, the secret to cheap building is scale. When all you build is a few boats, planes or god knows what a year, of course each will be expensive. But if you build dozens, hundreds or - just look to WW2 - thousands of units, suddenly efficiencies of scale and standardization really kick in.

This is efficient if you actually _need_ hundreds or thousands of units.

Which was clearly the case in WW2.

And _might_ be the case if the confrontation with China is proxy wars. Hundreds or thousands of spare units (of tanks, AA, helicopters, fighter jets) would be useful in Ukraine, for example.

But it's hard to see a use-case for hundreds of B-2s, for example. By the time those things are flying in anger, twenty or thirty will do everything you're ever going to do.

> But it's hard to see a use-case for hundreds of B-2s, for example.

Sell them to allies. But ever since both Trump and Biden seriously restricted Ukraine from defending itself... let's say the US isn't among the most trusted arms suppliers these days. A lot of soft power, just gone.

I'm from the UK, one of your wealthier allies. We can't afford to buy or operate B-2's. Not sure who could.. Taiwan? Saudi? Israel?

I'm German actually. We used to buy lots of American weapons but ... let's say we are reevaluating priorities at the moment.

Taiwan isn't that wealthy and all bombers all be destroyed by PRC in the first salvo, so not any point in having them.

It's the problem with ideological thinking - from what I can see some privatisations worked well (e.g. Rolls Royce) and others went terribly (rail, water in England) - unfortunately they tend to get treated as all bad or all good.

I disagree about rail - nationalised British Rail was pretty terrible, had more accidents per distance travelled, and carried far fewer people. It think it made little difference.

Nationalised water in Scotland is no better than privatised in England and Wales, and has a higher rate of sewer leaks: https://theferret.scot/scotland-behind-england-sewage-leaks/

From the same site: https://theferret.scot/water-pollution-scotland-england-most...

One thing of note about Scotland is that water is free (i.e. paid for by taxes) there.

It isn't free but it is less expensive. In fact in Scotland the annual water bill averages to £490 compared to £603 in England. This is despite a lower population density (which means more infra required per person comparatively).

So despite the best efforts of critics, they can't really show that Scottish water is any worse in terms of sewage outflows etc - if anything it is marginally better on that metric, and significantly cheaper to run. And the actual water quality is good, although that has a lot to do with incidental geography. Why would I want it privatised?

I fully agree. Moreover, it’s clear that Scottish Water actually has (if slowly) moved towards improving infrastructure and sewerage monitoring since that 2021 post I replied to, unlike a number of English water companies.

It's not free - there are explicit charges for it attached to our council taxes?

I literally said “I.e. paid for by taxes” :)

But it’s unmetered, unlike most of the UK, and, as the other poster mentioned, cheaper.

Nitpick: "Water and waste water charges are set by Scottish Water and billed alongside council tax." They aren't a tax themselves.

https://www.fife.gov.uk/kb/docs/articles/housing/council-tax...

Unmetered water is still common in the rest of the UK. There is a gradual move to metering.

I think there is a good argument for metering water - it provides an incentive not to waste it, and potable water is expensive to supply and has a significant environmental impact.

It does need to be affordable even to people on the lowest incomes though.

I entirely agree with you about ideological thinking. We need a pragmatic approach, and a willingness to think through complex problems.

The privatisations that go bad are usually monopolistic.

Claiming “Most people would agree” is not strong evidence that something was a good idea. I could just as easily assert most people would agree that it was a mistake.

> "Privatisation" does not preclude government investment in infrastructure.

But if private companies are taking the equity out of the service via profit, then why should the government spend public money to build new infrastructure to support them?

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Firstly, it's a type error to say "taking equity out of the service via profit". Profit, by definition, does not come from equity. Secondly, the government should spend public money to build public infrastructure because that's one of the major purposes of a government. Thirdly, if you're saying "private companies will use that public infrastructure to make profit", then I guess, yes, they will, just like they use roads. But I would certainly say that if water companies sell water from public reservoirs to customers then they should be required to pay for that service! Why not?

They're saying that using public funds to build out private infrastructure is a huge transfer of wealth from the public to the rich, and if the subsequent profits of that investment disappear into the same private pockets (or even abroad), the ROI calculation becomes so unfavourable that there's no sound financial reason to invest. There's a huge difference between investing in government-owned infrastructure vs privately-owned.

> Nobody able to change national policy within Downing Street or even ministries in Whitehall, at the time - or since - has had the gumption to say it's not working and we need to do something about it.

Thatcher's been dead for 12 years and out of power for 35, so I'm not sure why it should take much gumption. All it needs is national leaders who believe in the flourishing of the country, and that that requires infrastructure development, not just banks, software and scientific research. Unfortunately I don't see any such leader on the horizon.

> Thatcher's been dead for 12 years and out of power for 35, so I'm not sure why it should take much gumption.

Reagan, Thatcher, all the same, and their ideology kept alive by neoliberals (basically every politician that isn't an out and out socialist or snidely toeing fascism) and the Chicago school of economics.

Find me a national leader that believing in the flourishing of the country (and all the people in it) and I'll find you an entire political apparatus in opposition to that in favor of the flourishing of Capital.

> Find me a national leader that believing in the flourishing of the country

But I can't find one, that's the point.

I’m assuming you’re really young.

The US and UK were in terrible shape before Reagan and Thatcher took office. Both improved after they were elected?

If you're going to assume my age, I'll go ahead and assume your race, because I can't imagine why someone would support think Ronald "Strapping young bucks" Reagan, President of "School desegregation is a bad thing," steered the USA in a good direction. The same guy that opposed the voting rights act? The guy that didn't want an MLK day because people weren't acknowledging the 'reality' of the man? The guy that vetoed the civil rights restoration act?

Mr. savings and loans crisis? The guy that tripled the national debt?

The epically failed war on drugs guy? That guy improved the united states?

We were talking about making the country better not the media circus around it.

The US and UK economies were terrible. Stagflation, “malaise”.

Reagan ushered in a decade of strong economic growth. I’m sure all races would trade of a higher paycheck despite the media comments.

> Reagan ushered in a decade of strong economic growth

By what measure? Can you source that claim?

“Since World War II, according to many economic metrics including job creation, GDP growth, stock market returns, personal income growth, and corporate profits, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administrations of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents.”

Reagan was the only Republican that reduced unemployment by a little bit, but he was in the lower half of presidents who did that. But he failed to increase employment significantly, he increased the deficit significantly, and he did damage with the bunk feed-the-rich “Trickle Down” theories.

Even Trump agreed. “During a March 2004 interview, Trump stated: ‘It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.’”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...

1979 inflation: 13.3%, GDP growth: 3.2%

1984 inflation: 4%, GDP growth: 7.4%

Higher growth less inflation is great for us workers

Hehe, I agree less inflation is good, but that’s a completely cherry picked comparison. 1984 was a one-time GDP growth peak and it immediately dropped and never happened again even though Reagan still had 4 more years. 1979 was the peak inflation and has never happened again under any president. 7 out of 8 of Reagan’s years produced GDP growth ranging from -1.8% to a max of 4.6%. Clearly 1984 was an outlier and not something Reagan’s policies either caused or could maintain. Reagan’s average GDP growth from 1981 to 1989 is 3.84%, and it’s lower than what happened on average during Truman, Johnson, Kennedy and Clinton’s terms. It’s also lower than Nixon’s term, so Reagan wasn’t special even for a Republican president. Does that Wikipedia article’s coverage of multiple metrics for over 70 years with a pretty clear pattern and summary do nothing to sway you?

Some other things that are good for us workers include low federal deficits, income growth, low inequality, and job creation. And Reagan scores poorly on all of those metrics. People aren’t even debating these facts, they’re only debating _why_ Reagan and other Republicans seem to consistently bring the economy down despite their confidence in their economic theories...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?location...

In the UK the improvement was so massive that socialism died and Labour had to reinvent itself as a centrist party in order to stay alive. Thames water is horribly mismanaged and the rail as well is overpriced but i don't trust nationalisation to fix the problems. The government can simply cover up issues by providing subsidies.

Again if any politicians today were half the person Thatcher was things might actually get done. Even Blair might be an improvement.

No?

You can't run a critical resource like water purely on market incentives when the payoff for long-term infrastructure investment takes decades

The privatization of water supply is featured prominently in Adam Curtis's new series "Shifty," and paints a similar picture. Profit > infrastructure is ruining so much...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)

I was fascinated on my recent trip to the UK to learn how much of their infrastructure they'd privatized semi-recently. Trains, hm, well it kinda works in Japan so maybe not so bad, but, water and SEWAGE??? In what universe does it make sense to have one of the most critical infrastructure systems, the backbone of health for a city, participate in a marketplace? Insanity. Not to mention the fact that at the end of the day only a government could possibly have the ability and authority and budget to run new lines or the motivation to do maintenance. What's next, pay per poop?

It’s ironic that after British Rail was privatized, many UK rail services ended up being run by subsidiaries of other European state railways: French SNCF, Dutch NS, Italian Trenitalia, and so on. Turns out the state knows something about running trains after all.

For a while Abellio ran rail services in Scotland - they were absolutely awful and things got a lot better almost immediately the Scottish Government terminated their franchise.

It makes perfect sense. The capitalists can constrain the supply, push up prices.

And we Brits don't revolt – even protesting is highly legally-risky these days.

Is there a better country to do such things? I don't think so

"Careful Now." "Down With This Sort of Thing." "Unmutual."

More likely they'll hand out laxatives and ask people to help solve some fertilization crisis out there in the fields...

And there'll be commercials - Scotland - Heavy rain (horizontal) - A woman totally drenched (with baby in hands) - In panic - Warning about the impending water crisis.

How can we just ignore the elephant in the room; that not only has the UK population risen by almost a 1/3 since 1960, but the nature of that population has also been changed since that time, regardless of how one feels about it.

The UK (as only one example) is simply not the same thing as it was in 1960. Why would we expect the same results as if it’s just a matter of catching up from being behind, all while the ability to do so has changed?

If the UK wasn’t able to keep up with water storage capacity between 1960–1989, and has not built any capacity whatsoever since 1989; what makes one believe that somehow the UK, with massive headwinds blowing right into its face, could not only maintain the current capacity but expand it by about 50% (pop growth plus backlog), at the same time that the population has increased by ~1/3 and the nature of the people in the UK has changed significantly from a people that was able to do that in the past, but clearly could not do so since 1960, and while the finances of the country are inverting?

It is a gamblers fallacy. It is the aging man who still thinks he is in his prime, but also after decades of neglect and abuse of his body on advice of a devil on his shoulder, the serpent whispering assurances in his ear to indulge in harmful things and to win back his loses.

I'm curious what you mean about the nature of the population?

Age? Ethnic makeup? Urbanisation?

The population is older, less white, more in cities, fewer kids, but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with our water consumption or ability to build for it - other than maybe older people, especially the ones that moved out of the cities to live some LOTR-inspired faux-rural lifestyle, tend to be more NIMBY?

But equally though our appliances and lifestyles aren't the same as 1960. Showers are massively more efficient than baths, but we use them daily instead of once a week. Industry has mostly disappeared, and thermal power stations are on the way out (both extremely heavy water users), but agriculture has become more intensive.

It turns out that “If you put the markets in charge of the United Kingdom, in thirty years there’d be a shortage of water” is the realistic version of the Sahara sand quote.

Someone down thread posted that the private company has proposed several new reservoirs starting in 1992 and they've all been blocked on environmental grounds by the government or by NIMBYs.

For example the Abingdon Reservoir has been in planning for 19 years[1]. It is opposed by GARD[2], the Group Against Reservoir Development. It's hard to see how this is the fault of privatization.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abingdon_Reservoir

[2] https://groupagainstreservoirdevelopment.org/

Thatcher would be proud. What a waste

Nestle CEO:

„Water should not be human right”

> Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water.

But one can make a very fair argument where you can have a strong regulatory framework to ensure investment goals, exit clauses, and penalties in case of missing goals, no?

That never happens because the appointed regulator has no incentive to efficiently and effectively regulate, either.

In this case, the core issue is still not the privatization intrinsically, but the mechanisms of corruption and competing interests with some other areas.

I'm not a free market absolutist or a privatization zealot, but I'm curious about the fact that England cannot come up with a privatization model that ensures clawback and exit clauses, measurable goals, and a clear investment plan for it.

Even Brazil 5 years ago made a Law for the universalization of water and sewage. The goals are given in a clear-cut way:

> The Sanitation Framework standardizes deadlines and criteria nationwide: by 2033, 99% of the population must have access to water. Today, 30 million Brazilians still lack this service. The country also needs to achieve 90% access to sewage collection and treatment, a service currently not provided to 90 million Brazilians. Furthermore, water losses must be reduced from the current 40% to 25%. [1]

> Since 2020, 59 auctions have been held in 20 states, benefiting 1,529 municipalities and more than 73 million people. The contracts provide for R$178 billion in direct investments and R$56.9 billion in concession fees, totaling more than R$234.9 billion committed to the sector (for the private investment). [2]

There the responsibility for water distribution and sewage is within municipalities, and the biggest issue is that small ones cannot finance such a kind of service that demands high upfront investment and maintenance costs.

The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.

[1] - https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2025/09/04/san....

[2] - https://www.gov.br/cidades/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-1/noticia...

> In this case, the core issue is still not the privatization intrinsically, but the mechanisms of corruption and competing interests with some other areas.

Ironically, this is also the argument for privatization in the first place - that corruption and competing interests lead to government inefficiency, that the private sector is incentivised to cut out the bloat in a way that governments cannot, and therefore something that intrinsically is a public rather than private concern should regardless be privatized.

> The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.

Absolutely. I didn't think that this was even up for debate.

Particularly when, as in the case of UK water privatisation, there's a fairly convenient revolving door between the supposed regulator and the privatised water companies. Poacher turned entirely ineffective and rather friendly gamekeeper...

Nitpick - English water privatisation, I don't think the rest of the UK has private water companies - we certainly don't here in Scotland. Scottish Water is controlled by the Scottish Government.

You're absolutely right, English - my family north of the border are no doubt cursing me as we speak, I'll go and replace the cone as penance next time I'm there.

*England and Wales

Yes, but that would make private investment in utilities not attractive as the profits would be low or non existent.

Competing forces

So... because capitalism.

People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.

All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.

The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.

>People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.

In the last century and a half, we went from candle light and horse and buggy, to the lowest level of global poverty in the last 5,000 years of recorded human history.

If capitalism wasn't responsible then what was?

China is almost solely responsible for the reduction in global extreme poverty [1].

[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

Please expand your thesis.

Seems fitting, considering it’s the birthplace of liberalism.

"Thanks, Thatcher"

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