“My God, have we been cheated! Absolutely shafted. Seventy two billion paid in dividends! Sixty billion of debt! Nearly three million hours pumping out raw sewage in 2021! Three billion litres lost in leaks every day! Just 14 per cent of our rivers with “good” ecological status and every single one polluted to some extent. Studies say that will soon be down to 6 per cent without massive intervention.”
Feargal Sharkey on river pollution, interviewed by Robert Crampton www.thetimes.co.uk
East Devon Watch 
Here is the chronology of this:
1. Tory party sell off the water industry. To make it attractive to potential buyers, regulation is eliminated.
2. New water industry owners now have a business with massive infrastructure assets. They recover what they paid by burdening the industry with massive debt borrowed against the infrastructure assets and taking the money out as dividends. Buying the water companies has effectively cost them nothing, but the company itself now has no net assets except the ongoing revenue stream from a monopolised customer base they can exploit.
3. Put up prices and cut maintenance costs to massively increase profits and take those out as more dividends. When questioned, they can claim that this is a return on investment / infrastructure assets (but they have already recovered their investments and reduced the net infrastructure assets to zero).
4. When the public starts complaining about the consequences of cutting maintenance costs, you then demand higher prices to cover the costs of starting to maintain the assets properly, pointing to the previous justification for profits/dividends as the reason that you cannot pay for this out of the existing profits/dividends.
And THIS, my friends, is the TORY PARTY PRIVATISATION PLAYBOOK. Privatisation is a TORY PARTY CON – the means of transferring wealth from the general population to the already obscenely rich elite, consisting of themselves, their friends and their party donors.
YET AGAIN, I challenge anyone, particularly the Tory Party faithful, to put forward a single example of a privatisation that has benefitted the public in the long run. (I have made this challenge on several previous occasions and never had anyone come up with an example that stands up to factual scrutiny).
LikeLike