'A skint, cesspit nation still held to ransom by profiteering gangsters'

30 June 2023 , 18:42

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Ben Elton in The Great Railway Disaster (Image: Channel 4)

Here's what you don’t expect when you take your dog for a walk by your local river.

That dog to come running back to you with brown stuff hanging off her coat that looks like Cadbury’s chocolate buttons but smells like a skunk’s intestines.

But hey, this is Britain 2023, where it’s fine for a water company like United Utilities to take many hundreds of pounds a year from us, bung most of it to shareholders, then dump their waste in our rivers, even if it means our dogs painting our car seats in turd emulsion.

That happened last week in the River Mersey, while up the coast at Blackpool, holidaymakers were being told to stay out of the sea as there was a risk of catching E. coli from human sewage.

And despite these companies nationally dumping raw sewage into rivers and seas, on average, 800 times every day, we suck it up. Just as we suck up the sickening fact that since privatisation they have paid shareholders £65.9 billion in dividends yet are in so much debt our bills may have to rise by 40% to clean-up their sewage mess. That’s if they’re still in business.

Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade

But it’s not just privatised water companies taking the (untreated) urine. I recently had to buy a peak-time, standard-class return train ticket from Liverpool to London. It cost £342.60.

How is that a remotely fair price for a two-hour each-way journey in bog-standard seating? Why is it much cheaper to travel in every other European country where the trains actually turn up, are faster and their facilities better?

Ben Elton fronted a Channel 4 documentary this week called The Great Railway Disaster, a scathing expose of the lamentable state of train travel in Britain.

Experts told how, when British Rail was privatised by the Tories in 1993, it was viewed as the most efficient network in Europe. Today, two-thirds of customers don’t trust our trains to get them to their destination without cancellation.

Statistics show that since privatisation fares have risen by 50% in real terms, the cost of running the network is £64.3billion dearer than if British Rail had stayed in charge, and taxpayers hand over three times more cash (accounting for inflation) than when trains were in public ownership.

Like water, we’re paying more for much less as the industry is stripped of investment and profits handed over to mostly foreign-owned hedge funds. You can add gas, electricity and the Royal Mail to that list of shame.

Thatcher claimed that privatising our vital services would liberate Britain from the shackles of state-run interference, slash prices, increase investment and make rich shareholders of us all. It was a despicable con trick.

Today, her heirs blame Covid, Putin, even the 2008 bank crash, for everything being so expensive in a country that no longer functions properly. Yet so many of our deep-rooted problems are down to their own ideologically-driven policy catastrophes.

Keir Starmer is doing U-turns on many of his pledges in case they frighten Middle England. He should think again about reneging on renationalising our key industries because people are desperate to be freed from the profiteering gangsters who currently run them.

If his minders feel he needs to make it sound Tory to be palatable, call it Taking Back Control II.