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@docrussjackson
Jul 9, 2021 • 14 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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#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.

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.

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.

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More from @docrussjackson

GET A GRIP Profile picture
Sep 15
🧵

Tommy Robinson claimed his protest drew “three million patriots”. The Met Police reported 110,000.

Prof Milad Haghani, an actual world-leading expert on estimating crowd sizes, estimates “about 56,000... However I run the numbers, it’s very difficult to make it to 100,000.” Image
Unlike shameless liar and multiply-convicted violent far-right coke-snorting thug Tommeh, Prof Haghani is a world-leading expert on estimating crowd sizes. He leads geospatial transport planning initiatives, and is an expert in crowd dynamics.

Tommeh is a world-leading grifter. Image
Compulsive shameless liar Tommy Robinson made the laughable claim that his 'Unite (Divide) The Kingdom' rally was “officially the biggest protest in British history.” 🤥

In reality, as only about 56,000 people attended, it struggled to scrape the top TWENTY. 😂 Image
Read 7 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Sep 13
🧵

OK, I'll bite.

The word Fascism isn't 'meaningless'.

To spell out why, we need to unpack both the underlying implication of Andrew Doyle's argument and the reasons why it fails to adequately account for contemporary political dangers. Image
Andrew Doyle asserts that the term "fascism" is misused to the point of recklessness, echoing George Orwell’s 1944 observation that the word had been rendered meaningless. Doyle’s concern is not uncommon—but imho, it’s ultimately misplaced, especially in today’s context.
While it’s true that “fascism” is sometimes deployed rhetorically or hyperbolically (eg by Trump), Doyle’s framing dangerously downplays the genuine resurgence of fascist-adjacent movements across the Western world and undermines the analytical clarity necessary to confront them. Image
Read 23 tweets
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Sep 8
🧵

Boris Johnson appears to have had a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Thiel - perhaps the most fanatical of the libertarian Oligarchs and co-founder of the controversial US data firm Palantir, the year before it was given a role at the heart of the UK’s pandemic response. Image
A month after entering No 10, Johnson and his senior adviser Dominic Cummings had a meeting with Thiel, leaked files suggest.

Johnson is now likely to face questions about whether the non-disclosure amounts to a breach of the ministerial code.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/s…
The hour-long afternoon meeting on 28 August 2019 was marked “private” in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings.

Read 12 tweets
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Aug 31
🧵

Elon Musk has been amplifying far-right accounts again, including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe, and numerous anonynmous known #disinformation superspreader accounts like 'End Wokeness'.

Let's examine the context for yesterday's march in Richard Tice's constituency, #Skegness. Image
After decades of neglect, Skegness (pop 20K), stands out on key socio-economic markers on national averages: residents are older; whiter; lower full-time employment; higher rates of few/no qualifications; and concentrated deprivation - it's far-more deprived than most of England. Image
History repeatedly teaches us that burdening already struggling communities is a recipe for disaster.

These communities have been crying out for help for DECADES, but successive UK Govts have largely ignored their pleas, and continued to increase inequality, which harms us all. Image
Read 60 tweets
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Aug 28
🧵 @Rylan Asylum seekers coming here aren’t technically "illegal." International law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) allows people to seek asylum in any country regardless of how they arrive or how many countries they pass through, as long as they're fleeing persecution or danger.
Allow me to explain why asylum seekers aren’t “illegal”, and how misinformation and nasty demonising and scapegoating rhetoric by certain politicians and media, including news media, has made some British people less welcoming of asylum seeekers.

@Rylan
People fleeing war, torture, or persecution have the legal right to seek asylum.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK helped write, says anyone escaping danger can apply for asylum in another country no matter how they arrive: claiming asylum isn't a crime.

@Rylan
Read 23 tweets
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Aug 27
Farage's illiberal, immoral, & unworkable authoritarian plan involves ripping up human rights laws forged after WWII, which protect British people, & wasting £billions of UK taxpayers' money, giving some of it to corrupt misogynistic totalitarian regimes.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
Image
Leaving the #ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions

The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.

It could also undermine current return deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.

The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”. 

Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference to a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.

Many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would still be able to prevent deportations, even without international conventions.

x.com/docrussjackson…
Reform UK’s grotesque far-right mass deportation plan is not just economically and socially illiterate (Britain an ageing population and low birth rate) rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.

These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution.

It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.

The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”
Read 13 tweets

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