Summary
I couldn't agree more with John J Jones ('Refuse to pay', Monday). The privatised utilities - the vast bulk of whose assets have been and continue to be bought and paid for by ordinary members of the public, taxpayers and consumers, not by investors and shareholders as is the case with other private firms - whimper that they have to charge exorbitant tariffs to support investment in infrastructure, in the case of water, or because of fluctuations in wholesale energy prices, in the case of electricity and gas, while continuing to pay enormous dividends to shareholders. Anyone who bought shares in South West Water should have been perfectly well aware that in a relatively sparsely populated part of the country the ratio of revenue to infrastructure was low, especially with all that coastline to look after, but they piled in anyway, knowing the so-called regulator to be a toothless tiger (if it had been otherwise, no one would have invested) and that their fat profits were guaranteed because consumers had no choice; unlike electricity and gas, there is no alternative to South West Water, short of sinking a borehole in your back garden (something I suspect many like myself in the West Country might be contemplating, now that ultra-violet water purification equipment is easily available and relatively cheap). For God's sake, the stuff falls from the sky on our own roofs pretty much every day; how can it cost pounds20 a week?
A private monopoly is legalised extortion, but we shouldn't blame the shareholders; they, after all, are just doing what shareholders do. The blame rests squarely with our so-called leaders: the Tories for starting the whole process, fatuously treating public utilities as a liability rather than an asset and flogging them off to its well-heeled friends, and Labour for betraying what it used to claim were its principles and allowing - indeed, encouraging - plutocrats and speculators to hold struggling working people to ransom over the basic necessities of life.See the full content of this document
Extract
Rise Up Against the Profiteers
We used to ...
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