Labour can embarrass the Tories on the sewage scandal, but it's not offering much
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Politics
MLRD — 2 years ago(April 26, 2023 05:50 AM)
Labour can embarrass the Tories on the sewage scandal, but it's not offering much
THE poisoning of Britain’s rivers and seas with millions of tons of untreated sewage is a national scandal — and Labour’s decision to put the Tories on the spot is shrewd politics.
Coming just ahead of English local elections, it forced the Conservatives to defend companies coating our beaches in toxic sludge or risk accepting Labour’s opposition Bill.
With some of the country’s most popular beaches now unsafe for swimming and not one English river free of chemical contamination, this creeping environmental catastrophe breeds real community anger — and often in traditionally Tory-voting areas, as the long non-payment campaign directed at Southern Water in Whitstable, Kent, shows.
Southern Water’s case is typical of a privatised model that allows corporations to despoil nature with impunity.
In 2021 it was fined £90 million after illegally dumping sewage thousands of times in a five-year period. The judge decried “a shocking and wholesale disregard for the environment, for the precious and delicate ecosystems along the North Kent and Solent coastlines, for human health…”
Yet not only did Southern Water report a £139m profit despite the fine that year, it awarded its CEO Ian McAulay (now retired) a £550,000 bonus.
Why should decision-makers care about fines that disappear into the vast profits guaranteed by monopoly control of a natural resource nobody can live without?
And if saving money by breaking environmental laws increases profits, and increased profits mean bigger bonuses, then frankly they are incentivised to keep pumping human waste into our waterways.
The scandal has been worsening for years, with water industry union GMB regularly highlighting the billions in profit and shareholder dividends leeched out of our water supply, as well as the complete disregard for our ecosystems not unnaturally displayed by firms that answer only to distant proprietors: last winter we learned that over 70 per cent of the water industry in England is foreign-owned.
Privatisation of water has been a disaster on every level. Bills have risen 40 per cent above inflation since. Payouts to corporate “investors” have been prioritised over investment in infrastructure and maintenance, leading to waste through leakage on a colossal scale — and to the casual sewage-dumping that is degrading our rivers and seas.
Environment Secretary Therese Coffey dismisses upgrades of the sewer network on the grounds it would “put hundreds of pounds on people’s bills,” ignoring the fact that privatisation has already done that simply to line shareholders’ pockets.
An Environment Agency gutted by Tory cuts is barely able to properly monitor the problem, let alone tackle it. Its demand last summer that water industry CEOs whose firms break the law should face jail reflects an understanding that they currently have nothing to fear: like the P&O ferries bosses who illegally sacked 800 workers last year, they will do as they please until the law gets serious.
It’s easy to see why Labour regards this as ideal opposition-day debate territory. The Tories cannot come out of it looking good. But the tragedy is that for all Labour’s clever politics its own Bill promises very little.
Targets to reduce sewage dumping and bigger fines are not controversial, but if your timidity on penalties makes the Environment Agency look like the Jacobin Club you can hardly claim to be channelling public anger.
And why is the party of organised labour ignoring long-running campaigns to restore public ownership — a position endorsed again this week by the Usdaw union and long campaigned for by GMB, two unions generally supportive of the Keir Starmer leadership?
The world is warming. Global crop production is increasingly disrupted. We cannot afford to let faceless corporations with no interest in whether Britain is green, or clean, or liveable, play fast and loose with our precious natural resources.
Yet until we restore public control of those resources, that is exactly what they will do.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/labour-can-embarrass-tories-sewage-scandal-not-offering-much