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.
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.
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.
A handful of selfish sociopathic billionaires and the populist politicians and media they fund have deliberately divided and radicalised millions of people across the world, solely to protect their wealth and power.
They claim to want to help “save children” while spreading distrust of experts, reputable journalism, climate science, and vaccines — which have saved over 100 million children since 1974.
By dividing the public, they protect their wealth and power.
Rather than justify how their wealth was earned, these elites cultivate scepticism of their critics and of expertise itself.
This deliberate erosion of trust shields their interests while undermining the science that saves lives and protects our planet.
Robert Jenrick closed his Conference speech with: “Let’s build this NEW ORDER. Let’s TAKE our country back.” Hitler's “New Order” was a vision for an Aryan-led Europe which involved exterminating or enslaving “undesirable” minorities.
In Britain, a group of prominent MPs—including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Rupert Lowe, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman—are normalising far-right discourse through three recurring frames/themes: invasion, scapegoating for cultural destruction, and demographic replacement.
Let's talk about chainsaw enthusiast, Musk buddy, and darling of the global free-market right, Javier Milei.
Let’s look at which UK politicians and news media have been most effusive in their praise for him, and at whats happened to Argentina since he was elected in 2023.
Milei’s election as President of Argentina in November 2023 was met with enthusiasm from right-wing news media and populist politicians who praised his libertarian, anti-establishment platform as a model for radical economic reform.
Support was often framed in the context of Thatcherite principles, with Milei seen as a disruptor against "socialism".
1. Kemi Badenoch celebrated Milei as a "template" for her own potential Government, aspiring to be "Britain’s version of Javier Milei".
A global evangelical Christian ARMY linked to TPUSA/TPUK, "fighting for the Britain whose church missioned & colonised the dark, demonic, heathen world with light, truth & salvation", founded by a former British boy band member addicted to cocaine until he found God?
WTAF!🤯
'The King's Army' is a non-denominational Christian evangelism and discipleship movement launched in the UK mid-2024 - a "spiritual army" of believers enlisted to combat sin, cultural decay, and "darkness" through aggressive street outreach, prayer marches and public protests. 🤪
Drawing on biblical military metaphors, it emphasises "virtue and valor" among Christians, urging them to "stop living like civilians and start fighting like soldiers!"
It targets young men for recruitment, standing against issues like secularism and "immoral culture"!
Two people have died and three are in a serious condition following a suspected terror attack on a Manchester synagogue. Muslim leaders have condemned the attack. The suspect was shot dead by Police.
Some @X accounts are blaming Starmer. What's this got to do with @elonmusk?
Since Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and rebranded it as @X, the platform has transformed from a space for news and debate into a megaphone for hate, disinformation, and extremist ideology.
The consequences are now spilling into the streets.
Musk’s first act as owner was to gut @X’s safety and moderation teams, firing around 80% of staff responsible for enforcing hate-speech and misinformation policies.
Ellison (~$390bn), Musk (~£385bn), and Zuckerberg (~$260): the three richest men on earth.
Ellison is buying TikTok. He controls nearly 50% of Paramount Skydance and wants Warner Bros Discovery. Carrie Symonds's dad is a director of his Foundation.
For more than a century, some of the richest people on earth have bought up various media in order to shape politics and public opinion in a way that protects their wealth and power from democracy.
Musk, Zuckerberg and Ellison are doing precisely this on steroids.
These billionaires are reshaping the world into a dystopia that makes The Handmaids Tale look quaint.
Ellison owns 98% of one of the largest Hawaiian Islands, rolls out his total global surveillance system called 'The Oracle' to ensure 'good behaviour'.