Monday 25 September 2023: Water Community Second Birthday
I am not an enthusiast regarding birthdays, although I do mark the anniversary of family deaths, such as those of my father, mother and sister, as well as my uncle, aunt and cousin, my wife's parents, uncles and aunts. Even our daughter's birthday is a date we remember with some sadness, as it was her birth that caused her considerable physical disabilities and deafness. I recognise that other people treat birthdays with a lightheartedness that I consider to be levity.
I am doubtful in the extreme that the ready expression of my views regarding commercially-operated public water companies are welcome to the management of Affinity Water. My willingness to participate in this focus group is based partly on my wish to make clear my continued principled opposition to the theft from the public domain by the Thatcher administration of a publicly-owned utility, and partly to express my wish for the natural environment and the water supply infrastructure to be safeguarded while our fresh water supply is stewarded by a commercially-operated water company. I imagine that my participation is tolerated only because it (my participation, that is) adds credibility to the breadth of the focus group. In the past, I have taught many courses, some of which have been cursed with the presence of a gadfly, and I have silently wished that the irritant would stop attending. I dislike my own wallowing in sourness. However, I have, over the years, been cheated out of quite a lot of money, nine hundred pounds here, a few thousand pounds there (the list goes on) about which I have been able to do absolutely nothing. In the 1980s I watched, impotent, as the Thatcher administration "sold off the family silver" as the successive privatisations were described at the time, giving tax cuts to the rich and greedy. I listened to the lies told about how the average person would become the shareholding owners of the formerly publicly-owned public utilities, and how commercial investment would breathe new life into moribund nationally-owned industries (which had, in truth, been starved of investment in preparation for privatisation). I lived on the Durham coalfield when Arthur Scargill claimed that the Thatcher administration had a secret plan to end coal mining in Britain. This claim was denied by the government (and the right-wing newspapers). However, after the miner's strike was broken, the government claimed that the coal mines were uneconomic, and closed them all. In 1987, the NCB was renamed the British Coal Corporation, and its assets were subsequently privatised. I lived in sight of Consett steel works when Ian MacGregor, brought in by the Thatcher administration to decimate the British Steel workforce (95,000 redundancies), closed down the Consett furnaces for ever, foreshadowing the privatisation of British Steel in 1988. How many people in Britain have suffered over the past few years due to astronomical electricity prices because the Thatcher administration privatised the electricity supply? How many people in Britain attempt to travel on the railways, only to find their train cancelled, because the franchise model of rail privatisation brought in by the Thatcher administration is so dysfunctional? How many people in Britain continue to suffer in sub-standard and extremely expensive privately-rented accommodation because the Thatcher administration sold off much of the municipally-owned social housing ('council houses'). Living in County Durham, I knew that there would always be water in the taps, because the water board had built Kielder Reservoir ("Kielder Water"). Planned in the 1960s, begun in 1975, it was completed in 1981, and opened in 1982. It has England's largest hydroelectric power plant. Ten years later, the privatisation of the water industry was touted by the government to be the unlocking of huge investment in infrastructure. However, to my knowledge, no new reservoirs (of any size) have been built in England since water companies were privatised. Thirty years of massive underinvestment had led to levels of leaks that should belong to reports about economically-underdeveloped countries: water companies currently leak around a quarter of their supply through old pipes, losing 2,954m litres a day in 2021.
I am in little doubt that many people involved with this focus group will, at best, consider me and my views to be too serious. I imagine that a significant proportion will disagree with my politics. I also imagine that many will think that I should "move on". However, I know and remember what happened in the 1980s, when people all around me were cheated out of their jobs, their homes and their money, in the orgy of the greedy, 'loadsamoney' society. A gross injustice was perpetrated, and water privatisation was an element of that injustice. I was able to do little (although not absolutely nothing) about any of it at the time, and perhaps resorting to act as a gadfly now is little more than my guilt at not having done more then.
Oh, and by the way, I also lived briefly in St. Albans in the summer of 1976 (remember that 'very hot summer'?), on the far side of Verulam Park. I crossed the River Ver daily. Last summer (2022), Affinity Water ran half the River Ver completely dry due to abstracting too much water. Nearly 10 million litres of water were abstracted daily from the river. Affinity Water issued a statement saying that it is committed to reducing the amount of water it takes from the environment.
