Rod Liddle tells us about the water companies:
Perhaps, you might ask, with a general election in the offing, we might have opposition parties who will start to put this right? Well, I wouldn’t count on it. You may have heard the usual edentate, spavined gibbering on the issue from the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, as well as lectures from a supposedly appalled Labour front bench. But neither of those parties is prepared to do what is morally, economically and practically the only sensible option, which is to take the water companies back into state ownership and restore a sense of priority when it comes to how and where the money should be spent and how much should be charged to households.
The but….being that we used to have exactly that system, politics deciding how much was to be invested in the water companies, politics deciding how much the workers would be paid, politics deciding how much households would be charged and even politics deciding how the resultant profits would be spent.
The result was worse.
No, really - which is why the water companies were privatised. Investment, since then, has risen. Water quality has risen substantially. Prices to consumers - households - have risen by less under the capitalist format to achieve those goals than they would have done under the old politics system.
As we mentioned yesterday, we can also prove this. For the Home Nations have four different management structures. Only England is that regulated but capitalist firms. The performance in England - quality of water in the pipes, quality of water in the environment, prices to households - is better than that in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland with their non- regulated capitalist systems, with their more politically decided systems.
This is all simply factually true. Yea even though the entire country is wholly convinced of the opposite. Another strike against politics as a method of management. That politics, as it is actually done, becomes unmoored from reality and facts.
The English water system is better than it was before privatisation. The English water system, capitalist as it is, has improved more than the other three water systems in the larger polity. This is the evidence being used to reverse the very action that improved the water system in England. This is a proposition that can be tested. Yet no one is doing so - politics just isn’t a good management system.