Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

For six years, privatised Southern Water deliberately poured enormous volumes of untreated sewage into the sea to avoid financial penalties & the cost of upgrading & maintaining infrastructure.

Deregulated free-market #capitalism isn't working.

theguardian.com/environment/20…

The privatised water company discharged between 16 & 21 BILLION litres of raw sewage into some of the most precious & delicate environments in the country.

But hey, at least the inefficient Marxist nanny state wasn't running it, & the shareholders did extremely well out of it!

“These offences show a shocking & wholesale disregard for the environment, for precious & delicate ecosystems & coastlines, for human health, & for fisheries & other legitimate businesses that operate in the coastal waters,” said the judge.

The deregulated free-market in action!

Southern Water has a history of criminal activity with 168 previous offences/cautions for “previous & persistent pollution of the environment. There is no evidence the company took any notice of the penalties imposed or the remarks of the courts. Its offending simply continued.”

In 1989 the ten publicly owned water & sewerage authorities were privatised. This was achieved by transferring the water supply & sewerage assets, & the relevant staff, of the Southern Water Authority into the limited company Southern Water Services Ltd.

Privatisation was accompanied by the raising of capital by floating parent companies on the London Stock Exchange, a one-off injection of "public capital", the write off of significant government debt, & the provision of capital tax allowances.

In 1996 Southern Water was purchased in a hostile takeover bid by Scottish Power, itself now a subsidiary of Spanish multinational Iberdrola. During this period, assets including in-house scientific laboratory services were shut down, dismantled & sold off.

Maximise that profit!

In 2002, Scottish Power sold the company to First Aqua Limited, then in 2007, to Greensands Investments Limited - a consortium made up of a fund advised by Sajid Javid's recent paymaster JP Morgan Asset Management, Australia's Challenger Infrastructure fund, & Swiss bank UBS. 🇬🇧

Tories, supported by the UK press & a global network of libertarian billionaire-funded free-market think tanks & free-market Brextremist fundamentalists will keep telling voters that There Is No Alternative to free-market fundamentalism.

It is the biggest scam in history.

At the heart of the neoliberal project has been the privatisation of public services & other publicly held assets.

The strategy began in earnest here in Britain during the Thatcherism of the 1980s, & has engulfed the world since.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1359445197113950208

It was & is mainly about one thing only: shifting wealth & the balance of power to the global ruling elite, who have now amassed at least $30 TRILLION offshore.

The war on the poor has been waged war for the past 40 years.

And so here we are.

russjackson.medium.com/are-we-there-y…

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the fault lines & revealed the lengths Govts like ours are prepared to go to to defend the interests of those they represent - it's no coincidence that our Govt is stuffed full of bankers & corporate lobbyists.

We MUST wrestle back control.

The economic system is creaking & democracy is fragile. The culture war seems trivial, but divide & rule has been a VERY successful elite strategy for centuries. It took TWO World Wars before we got the #NHS & the welfare state, & now they're almost gone.

https://twitter.com/premnsikka/status/1413506996272312324

Bringing the toxic broken tax-dodging water companies back into public ownership would be a small start in beginning to repair our country, which is being systematically exploited & polarised by a tiny cabal of free-market fundamentalist Libertarians.

https://twitter.com/premnsikka/status/1413798207541415936