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?

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Meet the Tory candidate who wants to euthanise the unemployed

We all know there are a lot of right-wing people out there who secretly think that the Nazi concentration camps were a great idea, but that few of them are actually stupid enough to actually come out and promote Nazi-style eugenics in public, because they know the idea of state-administered murder of political non-conformists, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and so-called 'degenerates' fills most normal people with horror and revulsion.

One right-winger who is actually stupid enough to publicly promote the idea that people on benefits should be sent to death camps is the new Tory parliamentary candidate for the Gower constituency in Wales, Francesca O'Brien.

We're all aware of how "poverty porn" shows like Benefit Street were designed in order to whip up public hate against people who rely on benefits to survive, and to justify the Tory ideological agenda of vandalising the welfare state.

O'Brien is clearly one of the shows' target audience, because after watching an episode in 2014 she went onto Facebook to declare that the people on the show needed "putting down", and then endorse a reply proposing a "twat a tramp Tuesday".

Someone actually proposed a campaign of public beatings for homeless people, and instead of calling it out as vile vigilante nonsense, O'Brien responded "I'm liking that idea ... ha ha. Made me laugh"!

O'Brien has subsequently deleted the vile comments in the pathetic belief that the Internet will just forget the fact that she's some kind of hateful far-right ranter from the Britain First school of social media discourse.

And the Tory party have indicated how far they've moved to the extreme-right by continuing to endorse this vile woman as their chosen candidate.

yes they've spent the last nine years driving millions into absolute destitution with policies like sanctions, the benefits freeze, wage repression, disability benefit cuts, disability denial assessments ... but now they're unapologetically standing a candidate who says the state should go even further than systematically hounding disabled people and driving vulnerable people into starvation and suicide, and actually just kill them.

Let's hope the people of Gower have the good sense to reject this awful woman, and elect someone who has never actually proposed Nazi style eugenics, or laughed about vigilante violence campaigns against the homeless.

If she loses her bid to become an MP and then falls on hard times because of employers' understandable reservations about employing someone with such vile views, perhaps one day she might learn just a little bit of humility and decency?

 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.

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Meet the Tory rape trial saboteur

Meet Ross England, a rape trial saboteur who the Tory party somehow figured to be a fit and proper person to stand as their candidate in the Vale of Glamorgan in the upcoming Welsh Assembly election.

England was appearing at Cardiff Crown Court as a character witness for the accused when he decided to allege that the rape victim had engaged in group sex in the past, despite the judge Stephen Hopkins QC ruling the past sexual history of the victim inadmissible.

Bringing up the allegation of group sex (which the victim outright denies) was clearly a deliberate effort to unfairly prejudice the trial against the victim in order to get his mate off.

The judge was quite rightly infuriated by England's behaviour, responding "Why did you say that? Are you completely stupid? You have managed, singlehandedly, and I have no doubt it was deliberate on your part, to sabotage this trial. Mr England, as far as I am concerned, this matter so far as you are concerned, isn’t ended. I shall be writing personal letters to people who are politically close to you and I hope they take appropriate action. Get out of my court."

The trial was suspended, but England's rapist friend was eventually found guilty at a retrial and sent down for five years.

The victim told BBC Wales "It is completely shocking to me that Ross England would stand up in court and say these things, given that they are untrue ... For him to just blurt that out, proves to me that it was a formulated plan that he and whoever else conjured to try and derail the trial ... I think it was an absolutely deliberate attempt to sabotage the trial."

Amazingly, even after he cost the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial, the Tory party decided to select England as one of their political candidates, only suspending him after public anger at his rape trial sabotage tactics became too strong for them to sweep the issue under the carpet.

So next time you hear some Tory politician posturing as if they're "the party of law and order" don't forget that besides slashing 21,000+ police jobs and closing down 600 police stations since 2010, they're also a welcoming home to people who deliberately collapse rape trials to try and help their mate get away with rape!

 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.

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The secret targeted Tory ads they don't want you to see

All of the major political parties use Facebook to target adverts at certain demographics (like people who hate wind farms for example), but ever since Facebook voluntarily brought in new rules to force political advertisers to log the ads they've been sending out, we've had the ability to look through the stuff they're sending out.

In the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election they sent out this sponsored advert declaring "No New Wind Farms - Vote Conservative".

You can see this advert registered in the Facebook Ad Library (you need to scroll down a few rows to see it, because Facebook doesn't allow you to link to a specific ad for some reason).

The advert was clearly only intended for the consumption of a certain demographic the Tories have identified as people who dislike wind farms, mainly women over the age of 44 for some reason.

This anti-environmental advert was obviously never intended for mass public consumption, because it clashes so glaringly with all of their "greenwash" about caring for the environment, which even goes as far as pinching EU anti-plastic pollution policies that were opposed in the European parliament by Tory MEPs to present them as Tory innovations!

So it would obviously be a terrible shame for the Tory party if people widely shared this article detailing what they're sending out to particular demographics when they think nobody else is looking wouldn't it?

 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.

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Now we know why the Tories were so keen to hide their regional Brexit impact studies

The regional Brexit impact assessment figures that the Tory government were trying to hide have been leaked, and they spell disaster, especially for the North East, North West, West Midlands, and Northern Ireland.

The Brexit assessment looked at the regional impact of three different Brexit scenarios, a Single Market Brexit, a free trade deal, and a "no deal" reversion to World Trade Organisation rules.

In every single region it turns out that "no deal" is by far the most damaging option, ranging from a 3.5% fall in the London economy to an astounding 16% collapse in the North East.

The analysis suggests that aside from London and the South West, a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a financial collapse that is worse than the recession that followed the bankers' insolvency crisis.

The terrifying thing is that as a result of ruinous Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression the UK still hasn't recovered from the last recession, yet the Brextremist faction of the Tory party are pushing for a "no deal" Brexit which would hit us with another, even worse recession.

The second worst scenario is a free trade deal Brexit, which would still see significant economic contraction across every single region.

The least bad option is the Single Market option which would cause a slump of between 1% in London, to 3% in the North East.

It's important to recognise that the least bad Single Market scenario is off the table as long as Theresa May and the Tories are running the negotiations for their own purposes, because they have continually ruled it out.

Whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour could be convinced to adopt a pro-Single Market/Customs Union stance remains to be seen.* 

One of the standout things about the analysis is the way London is projected to suffer the least under every Brexit scenario, yet London voted heavily in favour of Remain, whilst some of the strongest Leave-voting areas like the North East look set to suffer the most extreme economic downturns from the Brexit they voted for.

This contrast certainly adds some more statistical weight to the Turkeys voting for Christmas narrative.

However it's not all totally clear-cut, because Wales and Scotland look set to suffer very similar levels of economic damage as a result of Brexit, despite Wales voting in favour of Brexit and Scotland voting very heavily against it.

Anyhow, the reason the Tories wanted to keep this analysis secret is beyond obvious. There's no way they can pretend that there's any economic benefit to Brexit now that their own evidence says that it would cause an economic downturn/recession in every single part of the UK.

Another reason they must have been desperate to keep this research under wraps is that it completely destroys their endlessly repeated propaganda trope that "no deal is better than a bad deal".

Their own evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that "no deal" is the worst possible deal, so they'll surely have to bin that appalling nonsense for good after this.

It's important to recognise that anyone still pushing for Brexit under these circumstances is aiming to inflict damage on the UK economy, so the onus is on them to clearly explain what it is that is so damned important that they consider it worth triggering a recession for ...

And no, blue passports (that we could have had anyway without quitting the EU) just won't cut it.

 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.

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* = If I were to give advice on how to achieve such a change of approach I'd suggest that politely pointing to the facts and evidence to request a change of Labour Party policy in order to "protect jobs and the economy" is more likely to succeed than a relentless barrage of #FBPE abuse, revisionism, misrepresentations, and lies from Lib-Dems, Tory concern trolls, and the very same people who were shrieking anti-Corbyn nonsense during the spectacularly failed chicken coup of 2016. 

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.

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"Suicide's an option" - UKIP's Neil Hamilton

In May 2016 the disgraced former Tory MP Neil "cash for questions" Hamilton was handed a lifeline back into politics by the 25,042 people in the Mid and West Wales region who voted UKIP in the Welsh Assembly elections.

In March 2017 the bigoted ex-Tory made it absolutely clear why his political resurrection was such an embarrassment to Wales by remarking that "suicide's an option" as the Labour Assembly Member Eluned Morgan was explaining that the economic consequences of Brexit would be hardest for those who could least afford it.

After his suicide remark a wave of disquiet rippled through the chamber until the Presiding Officer Elin Jones intervened to give Hamilton the opportunity to apologise.

Hamilton belligerently refused to admit that he'd said anything unacceptable by asking "What is there to apologise for?" and "What was unparliamentary about the remark?".

In 2015 the number of suicides in England and Wales increased to its highest level in 20 years. Whether Hamilton was being serious that people who are thrown into poverty by Brexit should kill themselves, or he was making some kind of sick joke, his remarks were completely unacceptable.

The people of the Mid and West Wales region who voted this corrupt ex-Tory back into politics deserve a slow hand clap for giving this appalling individual the chance to spew offensive and bigoted nonsense in their national parliament.

I guess most of them won't care though. They'll have an excuse for it, or they'll outright deny reality by saying it didn't happen, just like all the 'Kippers a few days previously who had no problem with Nigel Farage saying that if Brexit turns out to be a social and economic catastrophe he'll go and live abroad rather than apologise to the nation.

 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.

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UKIP's economic spokesman says Single Market access is a "critical priority"!

Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell were two of two of the most influential politicians in delivering Brexit. It was their defections to UKIP that spooked David Cameron into offering an EU referendum manifesto pledge in order to prevent even more Tory politicians and voters abandoning the party for UKIP.

Of course David Cameron's short-term EU referendum gamble failed. His gamble did deliver an unexpected Tory majority at the 2015 General Election, but within a little over a year Cameron was resigning in disgrace after throwing the entire economic future of the UK into uncertainty.

Cameron and his cabinet were so full of hubris that they didn't even bother to develop any kind of contingency plan for what to do if the public ignored his pitiful fearmongering and voted for Brexit, so after the Brexit vote the Tories spent the next seven months desperately trying to cobble together some kind of Brexit strategy whilst fobbing the public off with utterly inane drivel like "Brexit means Brexit".

When Theresa May finally got around to announcing her Brexit strategy in her woeful January 2017 clown costume speech it turned out that all they had come up with was the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler tantrum; "give us what we want or we'll blow up an economic bomb by quitting the EU without any kind of trade agreement"!

It's clear that with their diplomatic ineptitude the Tories are slow-marching the UK towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit with no access to the Single Market, and Mark Reckless is terribly complicit in getting us into this precarious situation.

After losing his Westminster seat at the 2015 General Election Mark Reckless soon resurfaced as a UKIP representative in the Welsh Assembly, where he now heads up the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. This committee has been looking at the potential impact of Brexit on agriculture, the environment and rural communities, and some of their findings are astounding given who their chairman is.

As chairman of the committee Reckless has stated that there is "access to the Single Market place, continuation of financial support and assurances over migrant labour are critical priorities"! [source]

Given that Reckless and his ilk played such a critical role in taking the UK to the brink of a catastrophic "no deal" Tory nuclear Brexit he has some gall to suddenly start crying that the Single Market and EU migrant labour from are actually critically important for Wales!

In a way it's indicative of what a farcical shambles Brexit is, that one of the leading proponents of quitting the EU is now crying about the damage that Theresa May and the three Brexiteers are about to inflict on Wales by quitting the EU.

If Reckless really cared so much about these critically important issues for Wales, how did he ever think it was appropriate to campaign for Brexit when he knew perfectly well that nobody, not least the Tory government, had an actual plan for how to handle it?

 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.

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