John Westmoreland on the growing movement to secure water rights

Water is the fountain of life, a fact that has been expressed passionately throughout human history. Thanking deities and saints for the blessings water gives us has been a feature of religions worldwide. Whereas in centuries past, dedications and offerings were tossed into the water to give thanks for nature’s bounty, corporate capitalism is filling our streams with raw sewage and pollutants that are threatening human life.

‘Get Britain’s water off life support’

The demonstration on 3 November was hugely important. The demands made by the organisers for immediate political action are a protest against government subservience to the water companies.

The government is guilty, as organiser Feargal Sharkey has said, ‘of an unforgivable lack of political oversight’ that has allowed the water companies to ‘game the system’.

Starmer’s dedicated role as a servant to corporate power is indeed unforgivable. There is not a stretch of river in the UK that has not been contaminated. The Wye is in danger of becoming a dead river due to the devastating effects of nitrates from upstream chicken farming.

Water extraction for agricultural irrigation is on such a scale that the National Audit Office has predicted that London and other major cities are likely to face an acute water shortage in the next ten years.

The water crisis is mainly caused by the water companies whose drive for profit lies behind polluted rivers and beaches that threaten our lives. Water that falls freely has been captured and turned into a commodity by the water corporations.

They like to say to their critics that in order to end the emerging crisis they need the government to invest. Thames Water made £1 billion profit in 2022, but it went mainly into the pockets of shareholders and water bosses. The crisis is profit-driven and the whole Starmer project of boosting public services through private investment is exposed for the nonsense that it is.

Nationalise

Our demand is for Keir Starmer to take immediate and decisive action to end the poisoning of our rivers, lakes and seas by the lethal cocktail of sewage, agricultural waste and other chemical pollutants that, over recent years, have been allowed to leave most of our waterways so filthy that they present major risks to human health and untold damage to nature.

Action must include:

• a plan to address the continuous illegal dumping of raw sewage by the water companies;
• a full set of solutions to end all other major sources of water pollution;
• the reform of our failed regulatory system, including Ofwat and the Environment Agency, so the law can be effectively enforced against polluters.

However, even if the regulatory body with oversight over water is beefed up, it won’t stop the cancer at the heart of the crisis that is allowing our water supply to be run by profiteering corporations. The profiteers need to be cleaned out along with the effluent they have pumped into our waterways.

Starmer and Reeves have resisted calls for nationalisation because they say it will cost billions. But why should we compensate the corporate criminals that have brought us this depth of crisis? Nationalisation would assert our right to clean water over corporate rights to make profits.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet