Who actually owns the UK's water supply?

A significant majority of British people believe that the water supply is so vital that it should be run as a not-for-profit public service, but the Westminster establishment consensus is that in England it should continue to be run as a vast profit extraction scheme operated mainly by foreign governments and overseas corporations.

In this article I'm going to give a basic overview of who actually owns the UK's water supplies.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

Scottish Water and Northern Ireland Water are both government owned statutory companies, meaning any profits go straight back into public finances.

Welsh Water is owned by Glas Cymru, which is a not-for-profit company. It has no shareholders, and retains any profits for the benefit of Welsh water customers.

So far so good. Two different models of how water companies can be operated for the benefit of the people, rather than for profit-extraction purposes. 

England

England's water supply is an absolute mess. It's broken up into multiple different regional monopolies, operated by various different private entities.

Research by the University of Grenwich found that privatisation of the water supply in 1989 has cost customers in England £2.3 billion per year more than if it had remained under not-for-profit public ownership.

So who are the owners of the private water companies that are raking in all of this profit at English people's expense?

Anglian Water (£1.4 billion)

Anglian Water supplies 2.6 million homes with water, and compared to a lot of others its ownership structure is fairly simple.

Its parent company is AWG, which a subsidiary of the Osprey Group, which is owned by the following:

Canada Pension Plan Investment Group 32.9% (wholly owned by the Canadian government)
IFM 19.8% (Australian investment fund)
Infinity Investments 16.7% (Wholly owned by the UAE government)
First Sentier 15.6% (Australian investment fund)
Camulodunum Investments 15% (UK investment manager)

So one of England's major water suppliers is 49.6% owned by foreign governments, and 30.6% owned by foreign private investors. Leaving just 15% that's run by a private UK-based investment manager.

Northumbrian Water (£820 million)

Northumbrian water supplies 2.7 million homes with water. Its parent company is NWG, which is wholly owned by the Hong Kong based firm Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings.

Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings is mainly owned by CK Hutchinson Holdings, which is run by the billionaire Li dynasty. Additionally there are number of other investment funds involved. Some of them are names which will be very familiar by the end of this article.

CK Hutchinson Holdings 72% (Hong Kong investment fund)
Conyers, Dill and Pearman 5% (Bermuda based offshore law firm)
BlackRock 1.1% (US based investment fund)

Other notable shareholders include: Lazard Asset Management (US investment fund), Vanguard Group (US investment fund), Norges Bank (100% Norwegian government owned bank).

United Utilities (£1.86 billion)

What used to be North West Water was merged with the North West Electricity Board to create United Utilities, which supplies water to 7.3 million people. The CEO took home £2.94 million in 2020.

United Utilities is a Public Limited Company (PLC) with a number of institutional shareholders. These are the owners with stakes above 1% (as of October 2021)

BlackRock 8.6%  (US based investment fund)
Lazard Asset Management 7.2% (US investment fund)

Legal and General Investment Management 4.1% (UK investment fund)

Vanguard Group 4.0% (US investment fund)

Norges Bank 2.9% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)

Impax Asset management 2.5% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)

Magellan Asset Management 2.4% (Australian investment fund)

Pictet Asset Management 2.3% (Swiss investment fund)

State Street Global Advisers 2.2% (US investment fund)
M&G Investment Management 2.0% (UK investment fund)

Nuance Investments 2.0% (US investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 1.9% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)

Invesco Ltd 1.7% (US investment fund)
Columbia Management Investment Advisers 1.6% (US investment fund - a division of Amerprise, which is based in the US tax haven of Delaware)
Maple-Brown Abbott Limited 1.3% (Australian investment fund)

Ignis Investment Services 1.3% (UK investment fund)
Nordea Investment Management 1.2% (Finnish investment fund)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 1.1% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)

abrdn plc 1.1% (UK investment fund)
Northern Trust Global Investments 1.1% (US investment fund)
HBOS Investment Fund 1.1% (Subsidiary of the UK-based Lloyds banking Group)
UBS Asset Management 1.0% (Investment arm of the giant Swiss bank UBS)

Severn Trent Water (£1.84 billion)

Severn Trent Water supplies 4.5 million households and businesses. Their CEO Liv Garfield took home a whopping £2.807 million despite the company being fined £800,000 for leaking millions of litres of raw sewage into a Shropshire stream in the same year.

It's another Public Limited Company (PLC) with a number of institutional shareholders. These are the owners with stakes above 1% (as of October 2021)

BlackRock 8.1%  (US based investment fund)

Lazard Asset Management 7.4% (US investment fund)

Qatar Investment Authority 4.6% (100% owned by the Qatari government)

Vanguard Group 3.8% (US investment fund)
Legal and General Investment Management 3.6% (UK investment fund)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 3.0% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)
Impax Asset management 2.7% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)
Maple-Brown Abbott Limited 2.5% (Australian investment fund)

State Street Global Advisers 2.3% (US investment fund)
Norges Bank 2.1% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)

Royal London Asset Management Limited 1.7% (UK investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 1.7% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)
Invesco Ltd 1.5% (US investment fund)
First Sentier 1.4% (Australian investment fund)
RREEF America LLC 1.3% (US investment fund)
Fidelity International 1.1% (Bermuda-based investment fund)
Janus Henderson Group 1.1% (UK investment fund)

Wessex Water (£550 million)

Wessex Water supplies 1.3 million homes with water.

It's a 100% owned subsidiary of the Malaysian conglomerate YTL Corporation, run by the Malaysian billionaire Yeoh Tiong Lay, and partially owned by the Malaysian government's pension fund.

Southern Water (£830 million)

Southern Water supplies 2.26 million customers. In 2020 they were fined £90 million for dumping untreated sewage into rivers and coastal waters on over 6,900 occasions. In the same year as this record-breaking fine they paid their CEO over £1 million in salary and bonuses.

Southern Water is a Limited Company owned through Greensands Holdings Limited which is based in the tax haven of Jersey, with the following major shareholders.

JP Morgan Asset Management 40% (Investment arm of the US bank JP Morgan)
UBS Asset Management 22% (Investment arm of the giant Swiss bank UBS)
Hermes Investment Management 21% (UK investment fund)
Whitehelm Capital 8% (Australian investment fund)

The Australian investment fund Macquairie has recently bought up a £1 billion stake in Southern Water. They're most famous for asset stripping Thames Water, paying virtually no corporation tax, lavishing £billions in dividends on its shareholders, lumbering it with huge debts, and flogging it off just months before it was prosecuted by the Environment Agency for pollution.

Thames Water (£2.05 billion)

Thames Water supplies 15 million customers, which accounts for 27% of the UK population. They were fined  £2.3 million in March 2021 for pollution, hit with another pollution fine of £4 million in May 2021, and paid an £11 million fine for overcharging customers in July 2021.

Britain's biggest water company is also its most opaquely structured, with strings of similarly named subsidiaries and shell companies falling under the ultimate ownership of Kemble Water Holdings Limited, which is apparently based on a Reading industrial estate.

It's pretty tricky to track down the owners of this £2 billion company, but they include the following major investors:

Church Water Investments Limited 13.9% (CWIL is owned by L3 Investment Holdings, which is owned by L3 Investment Holdco Ltd, which is owned by the UK-based Universities Superannuation Fund - Why they need such an opaque structure to hide their investment in privatised water infrastructure is anybody's guess)
Omers Farmoor Holdings 12.6% (Dutch investment fund)
Infinity Investments 12.6% (Wholly owned by the UAE government)
Wren House Infrastructure Investments 11.1% (A front company for the government of Kuwait)

Trustees of the BT Pension scheme 11.0% (Pension fund of UK telecoms giant BT)
Cicero Investment Corp 11.0% (US-based private equity fund)
QIC Infrastructure Management 6.8% (Australian government-owned investment fund)
Aquila Sonnet Limited Partnership 6.3% (A single purpose investment vehicle, designed to obscure the identities of the six investors)

South West Water (£500 million)

South West Water supplies 1.7 million customers. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pennon Group, which announced pre-tax profits of £157 million in 2021, and they're sitting on cash reserves of over £3 billion. Instead of using this cash mountain to make improvements and stop repeatedly dumping raw sewage into waterways, they're using it to buy up other water companies like Bristol Water.

The CEO of Pennon Group Susan Davy took home £1.724 million in 2020.

These are the main shareholders in Pennon Group (as of October 2021):

Lazard Asset Management 10.0% (US investment fund)
Impax Asset management 5.8% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)
BlackRock 5.2%  (US based investment fund)
Vanguard Group 4.3% (US investment fund)
Norges Bank 4.1% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)
Pictet Asset Management 3.9% (Swiss investment fund)
Legal and General Investment Management 3.1% (UK investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 2.9% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)
Invesco Ltd 2.1% (US investment fund)
Royal London Asset Management Limited 2.0% (UK investment fund)
Fidelity International 2.0% (Bermuda-based investment fund)
Columbia Management Investment Advisers 1.7% (US investment fund - a division of Amerprise, which is based in the US tax haven of Delaware)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 1.5% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)

Charles Stanley & Co. Ltd 1.3% (UK investment fund)
HSBC Global Asset Management 1.0% (Investment arm of the British bank HSBC)

Yorkshire Water (£980 million)

Yorkshire Water supplies 4.5 million people and over 100,000 businesses. It's another one with an extremely opaque ownership structure.

Yorkshire Water is run as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kelda Group. Kelda Group is made up of an intricate network of companies, which includes Kelda Eurobond (which makes vast losses meaning it has to pay no taxes in the UK), before you finally end up at the overall parent company Kelda Holdings, which is based in the tax haven of Jersey.

Kelda Holdings is owned by the following (as of October 2020):

GIC 33.6% (The sovereign wealth fund of the Singapore government)
Gateway HK Water (I and II) + Gateway Infrastructure 30.3% (Three recently formed Hong Kong based private companies, very difficult to find who the ultimate owners are)
Wharfedale Hong Kong Limited 23.4% (Another recently formed Hong Kong based private company)
SAS Trustee Corporation 12.8% (Australian state-owned pension fund)

Conclusion

The people of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland benefit from not-for-profit public ownership.

The water supply of England is used for profit extraction purposes by the following:

Governments: Australia, Canada, Kuwait, Norway, Malaysia, Qatar, Singapore, UAE

Private companies based in: Australia, Bermuda, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Jersey, Malaysia, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, US

You'd have to be beyond delusional to think that this chaotic and opaque system of ownership makes any kind of rational sense for English water consumers.

The only reason it would be arranged like this is in order for private companies and foreign governments to extract as much profit as possible out of England's water customers.

How on earth is it justifiable that the governments of eight other nations can hold direct stakes in England's water supply, while the UK government itself insists that it's unfit and improper for the nation to own and run its own water supply?

What kind of person believes other governments are fit to run England's water supply, but their own government isn't?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

13 things every Newcastle United fan should know about the club's new owners

In October 2021 the tyrannical Saudi regime completed the takeover of Newcastle United FC, via the nation's sovereign wealth fund. 

Here are 13 things all Newcastle fans should know about their club's new owners.

It's the Saudi state

This isn't just some rich guys from Saudi Arabia who have bought an 80% stake in Newcastle United, it's the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Their chairman of this fund the murderous tyrant Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who is also the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

No matter how much the Premier League tries to maintain the ridiculous pretence that they haven't, what they've done is allowed the nationalisation of Newcastle United, into the ownership of the world's worst regime.

Sportswashing

The Saudi tyrants have invested their oil money all over the world. They've got stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Formula One, Boeing, Bank of America, Disney, Uber ... Wherever you look in the capitalist system, the Saudi tyrants have probably got a stake in it.

The difference between these investments, and Newcastle United, is that their capitalist investments are aimed at making profits, while their investment in Newcastle United is aimed at improving their public reputation, at a massive cost.

Why do you think they've made that appalling wax-faxed woman Amanda Staveley the figurehead of their ownership, despite her only owning a tiny stake in the venture, rather than one of their own head-choppers?

It's all about massaging their public reputation, and putting a slick westernised veneer onto their barbaric autocracy, rather than making any kind of monetary profit.

We've seen it already with Manchester City, and the way huge numbers of Mancs immediately turned themselves into amateur unpaid PR operatives for the Abu Dhabi despots who took over their club.

MBS and the Saudi head-choppers expect to receive exactly the same kind of sycophantic fawning from Geordies.

War crimes

The despotic Saudi regime has been waging war in neighbouring Yemen since 2014, and they've shown absolutely no respect for the normal conventions of war. 

Probably the most famous war crime occurred when they conducted an airstrike against a bus full of school kids, but they've also used helicopter gunships to attack refugees, and deliberately bombed civilian targets across one of the poorest countries on earth.

One of the most despicable tactics the Saudi tyrants use is the targeting of water supplies and food distribution infrastructure, in order to use starvation and disease as weapons of war against the Yemeni people.

Their absolute disregard for human life in the Yemeni conflict has created what the UN has consistently described as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world".

Terrorism-spreaders

Ever since the oil money started flowing in, the Saudis have been using it to spread their extremist version of Islam (Wahhabism) across the globe. Wherever you find barbaric Islamist terrorists, you'll find financial and logistical links back to Saudi Arabia.

15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudi, and the ideological figurehead of Al Qaida was Osama bin Laden, who came from a wealthy family that's still well connected in the Saudi regime.

During the 2016 US election Hillary Clinton's emails about the Saudis were leaked, and in them she made it absolutely clear that the US administration knew perfectly well that Saudi Arabia funds terrorist outfits like Al Qaida and ISIS.

Jamal Khashoggi

In October 2018 the Saudi government lured the Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he was murdered and dismembered. The remains of his body have never been found.

The aeroplanes used to fly his murderers in and out of Turkey were owned by PIF, the very company used as a front to buy Newcastle United, and the CIA concluded that the murder was ordered by Muhammed bin Salmen himself.

The reason Newcastle United's new owners killed Khashoggi and hacked his body to bits, is that he was a critic of their regime. He was the son of a mega-rich Saudi arms dealer with connections to the Saudi regime, but he saw the light, recognised the vile tyranny for what it was, and began criticising their political repression, and their war crimes in Yemen.

He was a brave man who stood up for what he believed in, and for that, the owners of Newcastle United ended his life, hacked his corpse to pieces, and hid the remains to deny him a proper burial.

They kill journalists just for criticising their horrific regime.

Misogyny

Probably the most famous piece of folk knowledge about Saudi Arabia in the last half-century is the fact that they hate their own women so much, they wouldn't even allow them to drive cars.

Saudi Arabia is still a profoundly misogynistic society in which women barely have any rights.

They're not allowed to travel or get a passport without permission from their male guardian; they're not free to choose who they marry, and until recently Saudi girls as young as 8 were forced into marriages with adult men; they're barred from all manner of professions; they're banned from studying abroad without their male guardian's permission; they're discriminated against in family courts; and feminist activism in Saudi Arabia is treated as akin to terrorism.

Homophobia

Saudi Arabia is one of the most homophobic regimes on earth, which maintains the death penalty for homosexuality.

They kill people for being gay. Do we really need to say any more than that?

Anti-democracy

In 2019 the Saudi tyrants conducted a barbaric mass-execution of 39 people, including one death by crucifixion. Most of the victims were pro-democracy protestors (including a lad who was 16 at the time he attended a pro-democracy street protest!).

These absolute tyrants literally kill people for supporting the democratic rights that British people take for granted. 

Islamist extremism
 

We already know that the Saudi regime is responsible for spreading their violent, extremist Wahhabist interpretation of Islam across the planet, but within Saudi Arabia they're just as bad.

Apostacy (the "crime" of renouncing Islam) still carries the death sentence in Saudi Arabia. 

Most Saudis who renounce Islam are forced into exile, which is especially hard for women because of the travel restrictions they're subjected to. And even then, they're forced to continually look over their shoulders, because Saudi operatives obviously aren't remotely afraid to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. 

Corruption

The Saudi regime is notoriously corrupt, and they'll do literally anything to get away with it.

The Saudis even threatened acts of terrorism against the UK in order to pressurise the UK government into scrapping a Serious Fraud Office investigation into the estimated £1 billion that Prince Bandar took in bribes from the British arms company BAE.

The threat of Saudi-orchestrated terrorist attacks on British soil was enough to convince Tony Blair to personally intervene to shut down the corruption probe!

Premier League greed

The reason Premier League approval of the Newcastle takeover took so long wasn't that they had any concerns about the corruption, homophobia, democracy-repression, murder of journalists, misogyny, war crimes, terrorism-spreading, Islamist extremism, or even threats of terrorist attacks against the UK ... it's because a TV company with links to the Saudi government had been broadcasting unauthorised streams of Premier League matches!

Once this company put a stop to their unauthorised streams, the Premier League quickly gave the green light to the worst regime in the world to take over one of England's most historic and storied football clubs!

If you're looking for anyone to blame for the absolute shame of these horrific tyrants taking over your club, look no further than greed-obsessed Premier League executives.

Forget whataboutery

"Whataboutery" is one of the weakest debating tactics known to humanity. It's just a distraction strategy aimed at completely derailing the discussion.

• What about other terrible football owners like UAE/Qatar/exploitative US capitalists/Abramovich?
• What about other repressive regimes like North Korea/Iran/Israel? 
• What about other Saudi investments in stuff like Facebook/Twitter?
• What about Mike Ashley's ruthless zero hours contract exploitation at Sports Direct?

All of these other things are varying degrees of bad. And very many people have consistently highlighted and criticised these other things in the past. But the subject of discussion now is the fact that Newcastle United has been bought out by the worst regime in the world. 

The only reason any Newcastle fan is going "what about ...?" is to distract attention and derail the discussion.

It's a shamefully poor debating tactic, which nobody with even a shred of moral decency would try to use.

Buying loyalty?

The Saudi tyrants believe that just because they've bought Newcastle United, they've bought the Newcastle fans' undying loyalty too.

It's up to the people of Newcastle to show them how wrong they are, and that buying the badge doesn't automatically buy them the respect of the Geordie people.

If Newcastle fans have any decency and dignity whatever, the next home game will be absolutely festooned with pride flags, Yemeni flags, women's rights banners, and pictures of Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by the owners of Newcastle United at the age of 59, so the 59th minute would be a profound moment for the name "Jamal Khashoggi" to ring out around St James' Park, to tell these sick bastards that they might own your club, but they'll never earn your respect if they go around murdering and dismembering their critics.

Will Newcastle United fans put on a show of defiance against the absolutely horrific tyrants who now own their club? Or will the next home game have an absolute party atmosphere, featuring thousands of Geordies giving the worst regime in the world a heroes' welcome with tea towels on their heads?

The game against Spurs on Sunday October 17th will tell the entire world an awful lot about the true character of the Geordie people, won't it?

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Another 'stunning success' for the Tory rail privatisation agenda

The hated Southeastern rail franchise has finally been cancelled after the private operators were caught stealing £25 million in public funds since 2014.

Despite a long track record of delays, cancelled services, appalling working conditions, strikes, and lamentable customer service, this woeful franchise had been repeatedly extended by the Tory government since 2014, but the axe has finally fallen to the relief of passengers across the south east.

It turns out the private profiteers were running the services so inefficiently that the only way they could even spin a profit was to embezzle public cash!

And similar to the failure of all the other private rail franchises over the years, the public sector is going to have to step in at the last minute to take over operations.

The most absurd example being the way private operators have abandoned the flagship north east mainline franchise three times, with the public sector taking over at the last minute each time, running the service better, and gradually returning profits to the public finances, only for the Tories to hand it over to another bunch of profiteers who cut and run again, as soon as it becomes unprofitable to them.

This endless cycle of private operators extracting the profits, and public cash being used to clear up their mess is entirely consistent with the Tory ideology of "privatise the profits, nationalise the losses".

As a result of this spectacularly failed rail privatisation agenda, not only does the rail network cost more in subsidies to private franchises than it did to run the entire rail network when it was privatised in 1994, the government has built up a secret £50 billion+ black hole of rail debt from renting the track out to these profiteers at miles below the actual cost of maintaining them.
 

An overwhelming majority of the public want to see the rail network renationalised, and run as an integrated not-for-profit public service.

Yet the Tories persist with this shambolic mess of private profiteers extracting profits, then offloading operations onto the public whenever the profitability dries up.

Labour should be absolutely hammering the Tories over this, not just on the principle that rail privatisation has proven to be an absolute disaster, but for the sheer incompetence of allowing a private rail operator to steal £25 million from under their noses.

But unfortunately Keir Starmer is too busy waging internal factional war against his own party to care about establishing a critical narrative, and his shadow finance minister Rachel Reeves has only just been pledging her undying loyalty to the interests of capitalist profiteers, by swearing she'll ignore economic common sense, and the will of the British people, when it comes to the need to renationalise vital national infrastructure.

And to make matters worse the Tory Transport minister Michael Green Grant Shapps is seeking to protect the shambolic rail privatisation agenda by hiding it behind a fake renationalisation, whereby private operators keep extracting their publicly subsidised profits, but under a unified brand of "Great British Railways".

It's never going to get better when both main Westminster establishment parties adhere to the warped and treasonous ideology that essential British infrastructure and services are better run by a mix of corporate profiteers and foreign governments, than by the British government on behalf of the British people.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

The conspiracy-mongering and censorship frenzy of Tory MP David Morris

The Tory MP David Morris has claimed that contributors to a report by ITV into poverty in his local constituency of Morecambe in Lancashire were lying about extreme poverty as part of a plot by the left-wing Labour pressure group Momentum.

This is an incredible display of conspiracy-mongering because he's actually claiming that the doctors and teachers in the following clip are making up their concerns as part of a concerted left-wing political conspiracy.



If this Tory MP's evidence-free smears were actually true and the doctor was lying about having seen children with malnutrition-based illnesses just for political reasons, he would face being struck off the medical register.

And the teachers would also face serious disciplinary action and probably the sack too if the Tory MP's lazy smears about them making up lies for political reasons were true.

But David Morris is absolutely and totally free to make up politically motivated smears as a feeble effort to distract public attention away from child poverty in his constituency.

And that's the difference between Westminster politics and the rest of us right there in a nutshell.

If people in ordinary jobs get caught telling disgraceful politically motivated lies in our jobs, we'd face disciplinary action or the sack. But Tory MPs  like David Morris are absolutely free to fall back on brazen lies and ridiculous smears whenever they like, with no fear of punishment from their party, or from the (absolutely toothless joke of a) parliamentary standards authority.

It's clearly one set of rules for us 'lower order plebs' and another completely different and far more lax set of rules for out-of-touch Tory elitists like David Morris.

And to make matters worse Morris has now had an entire day to apologise for his evidence-free smear-mongering, but has instead doubled down on his claims and instigated a massive purge of his Facebook page to block people from questioning his statements, claiming that the negative public reaction to his original smears is another conspiracy by Momentum!

One of his Facebook posts shows 72 comments in the thread, but only one comment has survived the purge, while another post shows 65 comments in the thread with not a single one surviving his censorship frenzy.

This scandal has demonstrated a lot of things about David Morris. He indulges in paranoid conspiracy theories; he refuses to provide any evidence to back up his wild assertions; he has contempt for public sector workers like teachers and doctors; he ruthlessly censors all critical comments from his Facebook page; and worst of all is his complete disregard for the children growing up in shocking poverty in his own constituency.

All of these things show how utterly unfit David Morris is for public service, so let's hope the people of Morecambe and Lunesdale overturn his slim 1,339 majority at the next election and give him the sack that he so thoroughly deserves.

And let's also hope that the doctor and teachers he has smeared consider taking legal action against him for spreading defamatory comments that damage their professional reputations, and endanger their careers.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Tories and DUP are plotting to use Brexit as an excuse to tamper with democracy in Scotland and Wales.

Remember when the Brexit campaigners told us all that voting Leave would give the Tory party (and their uber-nationalist DUP mates) the pability to amend the powers of the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Assembly with no democratic oversight of their actions whatever?

No. Me neither.

Well on the evening of December 12th 2017 the Tories and their DUP backers/puppet-masters joined forces to defeat Amendment 158 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill by 315 votes to 291.

Amendment 158 sought to prevent the Westminster government from misusing the powers they were awarding themselves to amend EU derived laws in order to undermine the powers of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.

This safeguard is vitally important because there are plenty in the Tory and DUP ranks who would dearly love to restrict the power of the devolved parliaments, if not scrap them altogether. 

All 13 of the Tory MPs representing Scottish seats voted with the government to let them keep the power to alter or revoke devolved powers from their own national parliament without any parliamentary scrutiny of what they are actually up to!

Unless you follow SNP or Plaid Cymru politicians on Twitter you will have heard very little about this vote because the mainstream media have decided to completely ignore it.

Ignoring such a significant constitutional matter is bizarre enough in its own right, but this media silence is quite simply extraordinary given that this contentious vote occurred on the very same day that the entire corporate mainstream media erupted in an explosion of anti-Facebook fury over weeks old comments from a disgruntled former Facebook employee!

The corporate media will go into a frenzy of churnalism over ex-employee attacks former employer comments from weeks ago, but not one of them will even bother to explain the details of the Brexit legislation the Tories are currently ramming through parliament with the support of their fanatical DUP backers/puppet-masters?

If we look back to the whole debacle over English Votes for English Laws, the hypocrisy of the Tory party is truly revealed. They voted to ban Scottish Westminster MPs from voting on anything they define as an "English law", but when it comes to Brexit, they've voted to allow English government ministers to use Brexit as an excuse to redefine or even scrap the powers of the Scottish parliament!

Of course a significant percentage of Brexit voters were the kind of hard-right tabloid-addled little Englanders who actually take Nigel Farage's ravings seriously, but a hefty percentage never were.

However it should be obvious to all by now that Brexit is being dictated by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and you couldn't really get a more callous and opportunistic bunch than that lot. If they see an opportunity to use Brexit as an excuse to reduce the political power of Scottish and Welsh voters then of course they're going to try to take it.

Even if Brexit wasn't solely an exercise in anti-democratic Little Englanderism before the referendum result came in, this vote to scrap Amendment 158 shows that it certainly is now.

The Tories are already determined to use Brexit as an excuse to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no democratic scrutiny whatever, and their vote against Amendment 158 is proof that they're keen on rewriting the laws that established and defined the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and doing that without any democratic scrutiny too.

The direction of travel is absolutely obvious, and anyone (regardless of their views on the EU) who continues to support the profoundly anti-democratic and increasingly British-nationalist approach the Tories are taking to Brexit surely forfeits their right to consider themselves a supporter of democracy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

We all benefit from an educated population

The Tories are in civil war over tuition fees. Theresa May's loyal ally Damian Green obviously doesn't actually give a damn about student debt, but he is smart enough to recognise the demographic time bomb the Tories are sitting on, which has inspired him to say that the Tories need to think again about the electoral consequences of lumbering English students with the highest public university tuition fees in the entire world.

Michael Gove represents the regressive hard-right faction of the Tory party and he thinks that forcing such huge debts onto students that 70% of graduates will never pay them off despite an opportunity destroying 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives.

We can all see Damian Green's grubby opportunism for what it is. He voted in favour of creating a huge barrier to social mobility with the highest university fees in the world, but at least he has the strategic cunning to realise that economically assaulting the younger generations for daring to try and get professional qualifications is a recipe for future electoral doom.

Michael Gove doesn't even have that level of brains. All he's driven by is a vindictive desire to divide society into an absurdly selfish bunch of narrow-minded materialist individuals with no social consciousness whatever, because the essence of bonkers hard-right economic dogma is that the economy only functions efficiently if we all abandon social conscience, solidarity, empathy, charity and philanthropy in order to ruthlessly maximise our own personal self-interest at all times.

When he appeared on the Andrew Marr show Michael Gove's best effort to defend lumbering the majority of university students with unpayable mountains of debt was the absurd claim that "if you don't benefit from a uni education you shouldn't pay for those who do".

Gove is famous for his ability to make ludicrous arguments (that all schools should be above average, that we shouldn't listen to experts, that the First World War was not "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite", that the peace process in Northern Ireland was akin to condoning paedophilia...) but this appeal to blinkered selfishness is so absurd (especially coming from a Tory freeloader like Michael Gove) it's absolutely extraordinary.

The wonderful thing about Gove's latest divisive anti-intellectual statement is that it's so easy to hack.

• "I don't benefit from the Tory party using £1 billion of public money to bribe the DUP into propping up their failing government, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from the tax breaks given to private schools where elitists send their kids, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from the £130 elephant lamps that Michael Gove claimed on parliamentary expenses, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from lavish Tory handouts to the mega-rich, so why should I pay for those who do?"

The idea that there are no social or indirect economic benefits whatever to having an educated population is such a backwards hard-right delusion it's ridiculous.

We all benefit from having university educated doctors and surgeons in our hospitals. We all benefit from having university educated engineers and architects design and build our buildings and public infrastructure projects.  We all benefit from having university educated teachers in our schools. 

The social and indirect economic benefits of having an educated population are so numerous and so obvious it's extraordinary that anyone would seek to deny their existence.

If you ever went to school; ever use roads, rail, airports, or public buildings; ever enjoy the arts or use technology; have ever used the NHS; have ever needed a lawyer, solicitor or accountant; then you've benefited from somebody else's university education.

The fact that some (but by no means all) people who got a university education ended up getting highly paid jobs is hardly an injustice. If they worked hard and got highly paid jobs they should be paying back into society by paying the higher rate of income tax on their earnings.

If they're not paying the higher rate then the injustice is the fact that successive right-wing and centre-right governments have refused to clamp down on tax-dodging, not that some people got good jobs after graduating from university.

The idea that the benefits of a university education accrue only to the individual who received it is such arrant narrow-minded nonsense it's clearly designed to appeal only to the intensely thick, which is exactly the kind of dangerous anti-intellectual nonsense that Michael Gove so loves to peddle.

This attempt to create a sense of jealously and burning injustice amongst people who are too thick to recognise the social and wider indirect economic benefits of having a well educated and highly skilled population is yet another attempt by the political establishment to create an Orwellian reality reversal.

The real injustice is that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds are being lumbered with vast unpayable debts, while the kids of the elitist establishment class have their fees paid up front by their parents and never have to pay the loans, and the ridiculous interest payments on the loans, via the 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income.

The children of the super-rich elitists already have life massively stacked in their favour, but the elitists in Westminster (including a lot of right-wing Blairite Labour MPs) see educated working class people as a horrible threat to their own establishment class, and consider lumbering them with unpayable debts just for getting an education to be a necessary measure to reduce the social mobility of the "lower orders" that they hate and fear so much.

The norm in developed European nations is either free university education, or affordable fees. People in countries like Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Scotland are capable of seeing the wider benefits of having an educated population, but somehow the English have been convinced that education is not a right, and not a benefit to all of society, but actually a commodity that only benefits the individual, and which should be paid for through the imposition of literally unpayable debts.

What a narrow-minded and vindictive country England must have become to have allowed the establishment elitists to erect such huge barriers to social mobility, and to then justify it by appealing to the basest and most selfish instincts of the classes who are actually having their kids lumbered with the unpayable debts.

If countries like Germany and Scotland can afford to give all students from all backgrounds the opportunity to get a good education, what the hell is so wrong with England that Michael Gove thinks he can get away with promoting such blinkered selfishness with his absurd society-denying myth that the only beneficiaries of an educated population are those who received the education?

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