Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

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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.

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Are you an economic traitor?

Nobody likes to think of themselves as a traitor, but unfortunately many people are tricked into doing treasonous things.

I mean it's obvious isn't it? If someone wants people to act against the interests of their own community, region or nation they obviously need to trick them into doing it don't they?

Hardly anyone is going to commit treason willingly are they?

So in order to sell people treason, a grand deception needs to be constructed to make members of the public imagine that they're doing the right thing, when in reality they've been tricked into terribly betraying themselves and their own people.

Additionally the party that is attempting to get people to act against their own national interest is likely to focus heavily on attacking the reputation of anyone who opposes them. And what better strategy than to reverse reality and accuse their opponent of the very thing they themselves are guilty of?

The people selling you treason aren't going to come at you with a glossy prospectus with the word "treason" emblazoned on the cover. They're going to come at you wrapped in the flag, and constantly questioning the patriotism of anyone who stands in the way of their objective of tricking you into supporting their treasonous agenda.

This is the situation now. In Britain. In 2019.

The treason has been going on now for almost four decades and it's often wrapped up in slick sounding words and phrases like "globalisation", "privatisation", "free trade" and "foreign investment", but when you boil it down, it's blatant economic treason.

The groundwork for this economic treason was laid during the Tory privatisation mania of 1979-1997, when huge chunks of national infrastructure were sold off on the cheap, or simply given away for free, to the mega-rich.

The objective of course was to transfer ownership of the most prized parts of the UK economy to private individuals, who could then gorge themselves on the wealth they extracted from the British public.

In 1989 the water supply was privatised, in 1990 the National Grid was broken up and privatised, in 1994 the rail network was privatised, in 1995 Britain's nuclear energy infrastructure was privatised.

All of this stuff that was built up and maintained by the British taxpayer was hastily flogged off on the cheap, leaving the British public no longer stakeholders, but customers to be milked as hard as possible in order to maximise the private profits.

Many of the investors who ended up with chunks of public property were themselves treasonous individuals who used complex tax-dodging schemes to extract the wealth they were milking from the British public into offshore tax havens like Panama.

David Cameron's father was one of the people who made a pretty packet. Not directly from the infrastructure the Tory government were handing out, but by helping the private owners to siphon their profits overseas in order to avoid making a contribution to British society by paying their fair share of tax.

The rate of sell-offs declined significantly between 1997 and 2010 under the Blair-Brown government, but they did nothing to reverse the damage; they continued selling off bits and pieces like Air Traffic Control and the HMRC property portfolio; and they introduced PFI economic alchemy schemes to lumber the cost of current infrastructure spending onto future generations.

One important thing did happen during the Blair-Brown era that set the tone for what was to come. In 2008 the British nuclear power stations that were flogged off in 1995 were brought up by EdF, which is just a front for the French government.

It turned out that the private investors who gobbled up our nuclear industry in 1995 had so little loyalty to Britain that they literally handed the whole lot over to France when they realised it was more profitable to offload it to a foreign government than it would have been to keep running it themselves.

In 2010, when the Tories sneaked back into power (with the help of the Orange Book Liberal Democrats), the rate of sell-offs and giveaways skyrocketed again. They flogged off the Royal Mail at way below market value, they privatised the police forensic science service, they privatised literally thousands of the schools that our kids study at, they privatised the universities, and the Government Pipeline and Storage Systems (the underground aviation fuel distribution network that was created during WWII).

By this time huge chunks of former national industries were falling into the hands of foreign governments.

The Chinese and Qatari governments were particularly keen to get their hands on what used to be our nationally owned infrastructure. China bagged a huge stake in Thames Water in 2012, they teamed up with Qatar to win a major stake in the National Grid in 2016, and in 2017 the Tory Transport Minister Chris Grayling handed the Soutwestern rail franchise over to the Hong Kong government with barely a murmur of protest (apart from in a few left-wing blogs).

One of the most shocking things of all was the sell-off of the Government Pipeline and Storage Systems. This time the Tory government didn't sell it to private investors who then sold it on to foreign governments a few years down the line.

No. In this case the Tories cut out the middle-man and transferred ownership direct from the British public to the foreign governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates who own significant chunks of the nominally Spanish company it was flogged off to.

When they flogged off our aviation fuel distribution network to the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, the Tory party committed direct economic treason.

They decided that our aviation fuel network was better being run for the benefit of the governments of Oman and the UAE than being run by the British government, for the benefit of the British people, and the British economy.

And the most bizarre thing of all? They sold it off for just £82 million, then immediately signed a ten year lease to hire it back at the cost of £237 million!

Grean news for the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, terrible news for the British public finances.

Boris Johnson keeps wrapping himself up in the Brexit banner and poses as if he's a patriot who loves Britain, but he was part of the government that handed our vital national infrastructure directly to foreign governments, and he's planning to carry on too.

In March 2017 then-Prime Minister Therese May grovelled before the Qataris to beg them to buy up even more of our infrastructure.

Qatar is a country that is so dodgy they've even been accused of supporting terrorism by Saudi Arabia (the global epicentre of Wahabi Islamist fanaticism), but Johnson's predecessor Theresa May actually begged them to come and buy even more of our national silver that the Tories are intent on flogging off.

You might think nothing can be done to stop this Tory treason because "aren't all political parties more-or-less the same?"

Well you'd be wrong to think that.

Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-establishment outsider who has managed to wrest the Labour Party out of establishment control, and he wants to break up this decades long Westminster obsession with globalisation and privatisation.

Corbyn is planning to repatriate some of the most vital public infrastructure. 

Our rail franchises are now 74% operated by foreign governments. Jeremy Corbyn wants to renationalise them and run them for the benefit of the British people.

Corbyn also wants to take the national grid back from the Chinese and Qatari governments and run it for the British people.

And he wants to nationalise the water companies too, putting an end to Chinese government control over our water supplies.

The choice is a stark one. You can either believe the right-wing campaign of smears against Jeremy Corbyn and allow the Tories to con you into supporting their economically treasonous strategy of flogging our national infrastructure and services off to foreign governments ...

Or you can look past the barrage of propaganda from the economic traitors themselves, and their mainstream media bully boys who shill for the billionaire-owned newspapers, look at Jeremy Corbyn's actual policies, and understand that he's actually the patriotic one.

Jeremy Corbyn is the one who is saying that Britain is strong enough and wealthy enough to run our own infrastructure and services.

While the Tories are saying that we're so weak and broke that we have to continue flogging our national infrastructure off to China, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, or whoever else wants a slice, because in the warped Tory mind, foreign governments are so much more capable of running our infrastructure and services than our own country is!

Make no mistake about it. If you swallow the relentless Tory campaign of anti-Corbyn smears and vote the Tories into power again, you'll be committing an act of economic treason.

And what's worse is that you'll not be doing it because you've been duped into it, because you've read this article now, and you've had the grand deception pulled apart in front of your eyes.

If you vote Tory after reading this article, you'll be committing an act of economic treason in the full knowledge of what you're doing. Which is infinitely worse than doing it because you don't know any better than to be tricked by Boris Johnson's deceptive charade of fake patriotism.

If you vote Tory after reading this you'll be committing economic treason willingly and in full knowledge of what you're doing.

Don't vote Tory.

 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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Sources for "We can't afford not to" infographic

OK, here is some source material on the infographic, so you can know for sure that I'm not just making it up.

Source one: Railways

Here's the original source: New chief's challenge to get Railtrack back on track - Financial Times

Here's my article explaining more about what this means: Tory rail privatisation and the £50 billion black hole of debt.

It's also worth considering that despite this hidden debt-hiding subsidy, the private franchises also receive more in subsidies per year than the annual cost of running the entire British Rail network, tracks and all, before privatisation in 1994!

Source two: Broadband
Ironically the CEBR report into the economic benefit of super-fast broadband was commissioned by the private company that's done such a lamentable job of rolling it out so far (BT Broadband). The UK has below 10% access, while advanced economies like South Korea and Japan are up to 98% and 97% already.

Source: British Broadband

Source three: Royal Mail

Here's the Daily Mail article explaining this extraordinary Royal Mail property portfolio under-valuation: Royal Mail 565% mark up on land sales

Here's my article: The Royal Mail property privatisation scam is really paying off (at the public expense)

Source four: Water companies

You can read the damning University of Grenwich report into water privatisation here: Privatised water: a system in need of repair

 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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Angela Smith is spouting pro-privatisation sewage in the Guardian

The right-wing Labour MP Angela Smith has written an excruciatingly poor article in the Guardian fear-mongering against Labour's popular manifesto commitment to bring the privatised water companies in England and Wales back under national control.

The article is so poorly structured that it's difficult to actually discern the crux of the argument, but it seems to be some kind of argument that running national water supplies as public not-for-profit enterprises (rather than profit-seeking corporate entities) risks a collapse in standards that would make Britain "the dirty man of Europe".

The article is so riddled with basic errors, logical inconsistencies, and downright deceptions that it's quite extraordinary that it was written by an actual MP and published in a (supposedly reputable) national newspaper, especially considering Angela Smith claims to be some kind of expert on the water industry and chairs the all-party parliamentary group on water!

Britain?

The most glaring error of all in the was the way Smith referenced privatised water supplies in "Britain", suggesting that she didn't even know that water supplies in Scotland and Northern Ireland are nationalised. A mistake which blows a massive great hole in the main thrust of her argument: If nationalising water supplies would supposedly cause a dreadful collapse in standards, why is Scottish water doing so well, and why hasn't Northern Ireland descended into a hellish sewer since Northern Ireland Water was renationalised in 2007?

Public ownership

Smith's case that public ownership could lead to a collapse in standards further disintegrates when we take a look at Germany, where the vast majority of the water supply is provided by a network of some 6,000 publicly owned municipal water companies, only 3.5% of which are fully privatised.

Is Germany the kind of hellscape of contaminated water, overflowing sewers, and filthy rivers and beaches that Smith fear-mongers about in her article?

Of course it's not. In fact standards in Germany are actually significantly higher than England and Wales, especially when it comes to issues like repairing leaks (7% distribution losses in Germany vs 19% in England and Wales) and municipal waste water treatment (94% treated to the highest standard as compared to just 39% in England and Wales).

Smith's conflation of public water provision with poor standards simply doesn't stack up, in fact the actual evidence points to the opposite: standards of largely public water supplies in Germany are way higher than the privatised water companies in England.

China

Another gaping flaw in Angela Smith's argument against public ownership of the UK water supply is that chunks of it are publicly owned under the current system that she's so desperate to defend, but just not by Britain! 

When the Chinese sovereign wealth fund purchased a huge stake in Thames Water in 2012 the company was essentially part nationalised under the control of the Chinese state.

Angela Smith tries to paint people who support water renationalisation as having their judgement clouded by ideology, but surely someone like Smith who bitterly opposes UK government involvement in the UK water supply, whilst defending Chinese government involvement in the UK water supply is the one who needs to have their ideological judgement questioned?

Admitting the truth

In the 4th paragraph of her article Smith admits the truth; that "EU regulations have played a crucial role in raising standards", which blasts another gaping hole in her pro-privatisation argument.

Then twisting it

In order to make this inconvenient fact fit her pro-privatisation narrative Smith then tries to argue that it's only down to privatisation that the cost of meeting EU standards were met, but again, this is contradicted by the reality. Standards in Germany have actually improved far more quickly where only a tiny fraction of local water companies have been privatised there.

Investment

The reality is that water company bosses have extracted £billions upon £billions to pay out in shareholder dividends and bloated executive salaries, all of which could have been spent on repairing leaks and treating more than a paltry 39% of waste water to the cleanest standard.

Smith's whole argument that privatisation led to a boom in investment utterly misrepresents the couldn't have been afforded under public ownership completely misrepresents the way the water industry is funded.

Water supplies don't have to compete for "scarce government resources" against "schools and hospitals" as Smith claims. They raise their revenues through water rates in the same way as private providers do, but then save huge amounts of money by not paying out £billions in shareholder dividends and bloated executive salaries.

If a Labour government nationalised the water supply and then set about trying to raid the money raised through water rates to pay for other government services there'd rightly be uproar about it, but that's not what they're proposing to do at all. It's just dishonest propaganda from someone with an ideological axe to grind.

Cost to consumers

handing the water supply over to private profiteers comes at a cost of £2.3 billion per year to water rate payers.

If the water supply was returned to not-for-profit public ownership this £2.3 billion could be returned to water rate payers through reduced water bills, or it could be used to fund much-needed infrastructure improvements to bring our standards up closer to the standards in Germany.

The profit motive

When profit is the primary motive, stuff like improving water quality and dealing with leaks inhibit the profit rate.

Privately owned water companies have a primary duty to create profits for their shareholders. If the fines from failing water quality standards or widespread leaks are higher than the cost of improving standards then the changes will be made, however if the fines are lower, then they'll be written off as a cost of doing business.

This means that any improvements that have happened since privatisation have happened despite the private water companies, not because of them.

Public opinion

Public opinion is massively in favour of water renationalisation, so Anglea Smith isn't just arguing against the Labour Party leadership and the Labour Party members who support the Labour commitment to renationalise the water companies, she's criticising the vast majority of the public too.

Ideology over fact

At one point in the article Smith even says that "when it comes to ensuring we have clean water and a safe marine environment we cannot allow ideology to be the master of fact", which takes an awful lot of brass neck from someone who is so blatantly prepared to ignore and/or misrepresent inconvenient facts (as detailed above) in order to grind her pro-privatisation axe.
We've all seen countless examples of this kind of Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda from the Tories, but it's still quite shocking to see it from a Labour Party MP.

Conflicts of interest

One of the most extraordinary things about Angela Smith's article is the fact that she omits to mention that her husband works in the private water industry, and that the all-party parliamentary group on water that she chairs is funded by the private water lobby.

Even if Smith refused to admit the fact that she's essentially just a lobbyist for the private water companies embedded within the Labour Party and parliament, the Guardian should at least make Smith's conflicts of interest known to their readers.

Problems for Corbyn

This article isn't just proof that one of the most high profile Labour right-wingers is such a lame duck that she can't even write an article about her own supposed area of expertise without a mass of errors, logical inconsistencies, and outright deceptions. It's also a demonstration of the fact that Jeremy Corbyn would face serious problems were he to become Prime Minister.

When the Labour Party was controlled by the right-wing faction of the party between 1994 and 2010 numerous pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberals like Angela Smith were parachuted into Labour seats. This means that even if Corbyn won a majority at the next election, he'd struggle to implement his manifesto commitments like nationalising the water supply, creating a National Education Service, and scrapping Tory austerity dogma as a result of ideological opposition from the rump of self-serving, right-wing orthodox neoliberals embedded within his own party.

Nobody ever said it would be easy

Nobody ever claimed that returning the Labour Party to its democratic socialist principles would be easy, but just because a job is difficult doesn't make it not worth doing.

The UK has suffered four decades of unbroken neoliberal rule since 1979, resulting in an absolute mess of inequality, stagnating wages, failing public services, collapsing productivity, ruinous austerity dogma, and now the Brexit shambles.

Something has to change because "more of the same" simply won't cut it any more. 

Jeremy Corbyn has outlined a path towards Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, which is obviously unappealing to right-wing orthodox neoliberals like Angela Smith, but the other alternative is the kind of hard-right frenzy of deregulation, ultranationalism and deliberate disaster capitalism envisaged by the Brextremists.

We're facing a political choice between maintaining existing standards on workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, equal rights legislation, and consumer protections alongside a move back towards public ownership of vital state services and infrastructure, or a fanatically right-wing deregulation frenzy.

And by publicly fear-mongering about Labour's democratic socialist policies, Angela Smith is acting as a useful idiot for the hard-right Brextremists. 

But then the suspicion remains that when it comes to issues like austerity dogma, wage repression, imposing barriers to social mobility, and privatisation mania, numerous right-wing Labour MPs actually have far more in common with the fanatical Tory Brextremists than they do with the Labour leadership, with Labour Party members, and even with the general public.

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