Archive for April, 2024

Could Thames water lose the Tories the election?

25/04/2024, 10:45:26 PM

by Kevin Meagher

The water industry, privatised in 1989, was for a long time a chimera.

A public service that happened to be located across the aisle in the private sector. A big lumbering beast that just got on with the job and caused little fuss.

Not anymore.

Thames Water – the largest of the regional water monopolies – appears to be on the brink of collapse, carrying debts of nearly £15 billion.

Furthermore, its parent company, Kemble Water (a consortium that includes a Canadian pension fund, the China Investment Corporation and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund), is withholding a cash injection to prop-up it up.

That is unless the industry regulator, Ofwat, allows it to increase average customer bills over the next five years – which would see them rocket by 44% to £627 a year.

Ouch.

It all used to be much simpler.

During the nineties and noughties the water companies got on with the task of implementing EU wastewater regulations, which led to dramatic improvements in the quality of our drinking water, coastlines and urban waterways.

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Want to improve British politics? Advertise special adviser roles

23/04/2024, 10:02:20 PM

by Kevin Meagher

My Mum’s informal media monitoring service is always spot on.

‘They had some treasury minister on with Ed Balls this morning,’ she told me the other day.

‘She was absolutely hopeless. He made mincemeat out of her.’

Turns out the hapless victim of Ed Balls’s perfectly reasonable probing about the inflation rate was treasury minister, Laura Trott, putting in yet another faltering media appearance to add to the long, painful, list of similarly egregious examples.

I have these conversations with my Mum every day.

One hopeless minister after another does the media round, only to be pulled apart by interviewers like a French baguette.

There was a vintage example on Sky News.

James Daly, the deputy Tory party chairman, who made the police complaint about Angela Rayner’s disputed household arrangements, was on.

Labour’s Chris Bryant asked – again, perfectly reasonably – what he thought she had done wrong.

Presenter Kay Burley and Political Editor Beth Rigby, also part of the discussion, echoed the point.

Now, this was the most obvious thing in the world to ask him. Daly – badly briefed, panicky and defensive – floundered, accusing Bryant of shouting at him.

It seems to happen time and again.

Obvious questions that Tory frontbenchers should be prepared for leave them pole-axed.

It’s an excruciating sight and sound, as the life-force oozes out of this government on what is now a daily basis.

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The Tories have diminished the role of Prime Minister

20/04/2024, 08:10:17 AM

by Kevin Meagher

I was born under Harold Wilson, started school under James Callaghan and left under Margaret Thatcher.

My 16-year-old daughter was born under Gordon Brown, started school under David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss and is set to leave under Rishi Sunak.

A stark 2:1 ratio in a single generation.

In the modern age, it seems PMs are like buses.

And this presumes Sunak will last until my daughter’s GCSEs in the summer.

He remains the potential victim of either an early general election defeat, or a last- minute putsch by his own backbenchers to replace him, in the hope of a final-second reprieve from the voters.

It’s not just that the Tories have broken the constitutional precedent that parties should only ever change their leader/ prime minister once in a parliament before seeking the reapproval of the voters, it’s that they have diminished the office entirely.

Look at their record.

Hubristic David Cameron called and then lost a referendum on our EU membership that was practically unlosable, destabilising British politics ever since.

Dumbfounded by Parliament and party, Theresa May was unable to divine a coherent way forward over the country’s decision to quit and was forced out by her own side.

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Scottish Labour misses a moral imperative and an open goal

02/04/2024, 10:48:19 PM

by Rob Marchant

Yesterday – as many wags observed, fittingly, the first of April – is the first day of possibly the most illiberal piece of legislation in the UK during at least the last three decades (and it has been almost 36 years since the enactment of Section 28, the Margaret Thatcher’s notorious anti-gay legislation, so that pretty much fits).

It essentially creates a hate crime, which can be pretty much whatever imagined slight the person who reports it says it is. It is also a crude attempt to secure gender self ID through the back door, because it talks about “gender identity” (not a protected characteristic) instead of “gender reassignment” (a protected characteristic).

In short, it is exceptionally poorly drafted, making it completely unclear what the objective criteria are for having committed this crime; it is severely limiting of free speech, in a similar way to blasphemy laws enacted in developing countries; it will undoubtedly be used to attempt to stifle dissent on the Scottish Government’s LGBT policies, and quite probably instigate punishment for anything understood as religious blasphemy; it will gum up the wheels of an already-understaffed and over-worked Police Scotland; and finally, it will almost certainly be politically disastrous for the hapless government of Humza Yousaf, a First Minister so inept that he has been in a disaster at every previous portfolio he has held in that government, and failed upwards.

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