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Comment by maxrev17 | Hacker News Reader

UK is a cesspit now

That is specifically because the Tories privatised water. Historically, like most places, the vital-to-life water supply and corresponding sewage processing were owned by the public in England and Wales. People hated the idea of this being changed, but Tory doctrine says that absolutely everything should be owned by for-profit companies even though we know that can't work. So, first they forced the publicly owned companies to stop investing and then they privatised the water supply, wrote off all debt owed by the public institutions and handed the new private companies £1.5 billion because hey, if you believe in nonsense, why not?

The result was universally dismal, these private companies "leak" sewage into previously clean waterways, avoid taxes, divert as much money as possible to their off-shore owners, and of course they insist they constantly need higher and higher charges from their captive customer audience, then "oops" the money is used to pay off wealthy investors and none of the urgently needed work gets done.

I hate how the UK sewage system has failed. I agree that a good share of the blame lies with the for profit asset stripping owners. But just blaming 1980s Thatcher privatisation lets the government off the hook. The regulators (Ofwat and the Environment Agency) have watched this happen from the sidelines and failed to apply the law. Every “non exceptional” spill is a criminal offence with potential jail term, including actions of corporate conspiracy. The are 10,000s river and sea spills per year. Where is the punitive action? Why are the perps walking free? This is the soft corruption of the lobby and revolving door appointments (head of a water company one year, boss of the EA the next). Sure the only way to fix it now is (uncompensated) nationalisation, but the regulators have failed to anpply the regulations and are as much to blame.

Regulatory corruption (regulatory capture) is a understood and predicted effect of privatization. It's the class that decided to start and stay on the privatization strategy that also hold the political power to regulate more strongly.

I recall that most Tory voters in the 1980s were "sold" on the idea of privatisation (and had real horror stories in relation to eg phone line installation delays).

One of the ideas was to widen share ownership to the average bloke. Sure - that never happened (although many average pensioners maybe hold Macquarie via an investment fund).

This "class" actually, in general, are very angry about regulatory capture and we blame the class of woke bien pensant "leaders" who back scratch and go in and out of the media, the lobby, the civil service, NGOs and the privatised utilities scratching each others' backs and telling us all we are idiots. [Rory Stewart being their patron saint]

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