#PRIVATISATION

[probablyasocialecologist]

England is the only country in the world to have fully privatised its water system in a move aimed at bringing investment into the sector. However, most companies have slashed capital investment in critical infrastructure by up to a fifth in the past 30 years, according to research by the Financial Times. Over the same period the companies — which were sold off with no debt and handed £1.5bn — have borrowed £53bn, the equivalent of about £2,000 per household. Much of that has been used not for new investment but to pay £72bn in dividends.

Gill Plimmer, Anglian Water pays £92mn dividend to owners as customer bills rise

[generalelectionmusings]

[thoughtportal]

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Social Security and Medicare and debt Manufacturing consent

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

[kropotkindersurprise]

March 3, 2023 - Thousands of protesters angry about the deadly train crash, that was caused by privatisation and government inaction and killed 56 people, took to the street, clashed with police and burned a cop car in Athens, Greece. [video]/[video]

[eaglesnick]

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left to fight for it” – Aneurin Bevan

I’m no fan of Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak. Sunak is completely out of touch with ordinary people and Starmer will promise just about anything to get himself into power and then break those promise when it suits him.  However when it comes to the future of the NHS I feel it will be safer under a Labour government than one run by free market, neo-liberal Tories.

From a purely selfish perspective  - something the Conservative Party excels at - the NHS saves all of us a small fortune. When your child needs medical care it is free at the point of use; when your parents need medical care it is free at the point of use; and when YOU need medical care it is free at the point of use.

Of course we pay for this through taxes and national insurance contributions but the clue is in the phrase “national insurance”. Medical treatment in Britain, is, at the moment, paid for through collective funding. It is a system based on community, social responsibility, and the old fashioned concept of caring for your neighbour. . Aneurin  Bevan, the "Father of the NHS” said:

“No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means."

It is a sad fact that Conservative Party members, many of them rich individuals who can afford private medical treatment, have been undermining the NHS because of their unwavering adherence to the ideological belief that all things run by private enterprise are good while all public sector institutions are bad. . The Tory’s will, of course deny this, claiming the NHS is save in their hands and that they have no plans to privatise it.

 Lets look at the facts.

Despite Prime Minister David Cameron promising there would be no cuts to the NHS this was the headline in the Daily Mirror when the Conservatives took over from Labour in 2012.

“David Cameron cuts NHS spending by £500million.” (06/11/12)

Two years later and we have this headline from the Guardian:

“David Cameron accused of hypocrisy over £1.4bn ‘raid’ on NHS funding." (06/07/2012)

By 2014 NHS staff were on strike because of the Tory government refused to give them a 1% pay rise. Rows over poor pay and under-funding continue to this day.

While Jeremy Hunt was Health Secretary patient experience and staff moral took a dramatic turn for the worse. Despite presenting himself as a “champion of patient safety”, targets were missed, waiting times increased, and the very fabric of some hospitals began to crumble, leading to Hunt being labelled “the man who ruined the NHS”. (Open Democracy: 08/07/22)

In 2016 The Independent ran this headline:

“Jeremy Hunt co-authored book calling for NHS to be replaced with private insurance.” (10/02/2016)

Is it any wonder the NHS has been seriously under-funded and run down when the man in charge was an advocate of private medical health insurance? Millionaires like Cameron (£40m) Hunt (£15m) and Sunak (£651m) can afford to pay for expensive medical care but the rest of us are not so fortunate.

This brings me back to the purely selfish reason we should vote for the party most likely to protect the NHS. Below are some AVERAGE costs for private medical procedures and treatments in the USA provided by Statistica 2021

Heart valve replacement…….$170,000     £133,390

Heart bypass………………….......$123,000     £96,518

Cornea (per eye) ……………......$17,000       £13,339

IVF treatments ………………......$15,400      £12,084

Hysterectomy ………………….....$5200          £4,080

In addition, Americans have to pay for their stay in hospital. This fee is on top of medical treatment costs. According to Debt.org (30/11/23) the price for the average stay in hospital of 4.6 days is $13,262. (£10,406)

Whatever your political leanings, the protection and restoration of the NHS should take precedent over all other electoral considerations because we will ALL need medical treatment at some stage in our lives be that as a child or as an adult.

We know the Tory mantra "private sector good public sector bad” just doesn’t live up to reality: we only have to look at our polluted waterways to realise this. Whether Keir Starmer would be any better at protecting the NHS from profit motivated private companies is a moot point.

With headlines like:

“Can Wes Streeting’s private sector plans save the NHS?” (Guardian: 14/04/24)

and

“Labour’s Wes Streeting just used the SUN to talk up NHS privatisation” (Canary: 08/04/24)

we cannot rely on the Labour Party leadership to protect the NHS from the profiteering private sector, not least because Wes Streeting has been paid £175,000 from donors linked to private health firms. (National: 14/04/24) There is no such thing as a free lunch so one doesn’t have to wonder to hard what these “donors” might want in return for their money!

Even so, I feel there are those within the Labour Party who would work very hard to stop the leadership of the party from running down the NHS to the point of collapse, as is the Tory plan, so with great reservation I will be voting Labour in the coming elections.

Save Our NHS

[ladymazzy]

Investigation after 57 world triathlon championship swimmers fall sick and get diarrhoea in Sunderland race

This is what happens when you privatise water companies

[rumade]

Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Rivers

Anyone who's got access to BBC iplayer (live in UK or use VPN), I really recommend giving this documentary a watch. It's about the state of the waterways in Britain, and how private water companies get away with pumping sewage and microplastics into our rivers, citing treatment costs, while raking in massive profits and paying their CEOs millions.

[scavengedluxury]

The state of this! “The Labour leadership is aware we are soft testing various ideas but have asked us to keep it highly confidential so please don’t forward this email.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court has found that United Utilities can be held to account for the damage caused by sewage discharges. The ruling has set a watershed precedent which now breaks the shield around polluting water companies – leaving them open to a potential deluge of legal action. This major win comes after we supported the Environmental Law Foundation in a case the water company launched in 2018.

2 July 2024

[thelandofbritain]

Good to see that our privatised railways are performing well for the rich private shareholders... they're certainly not much good at providing a decent and affordable rail service for the rest of the population.

Typical Tory stitch-up of an essential public service, so that it pays their wealthy shareholder cronies and party donors, but milks the taxpayers and users dry.

Of course, when the private franchised operators go into the red and fail, it's the taxpayers who bail out the business, not the profiteering shareholders who've been taking fat dividends for years.

The CEOs still get paid obscene salaries and bonuses as a reward for failure, of course. That's how corrupt and cynical Tory 'free market' capitalism works... heads they win, tails we lose.

[thoughtportal]

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First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—         Because I was not a socialist.

   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—         Because I was not a trade unionist.

   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—         Because I was not a Jew.

   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Etymology The term ‘privatizing’ first appeared in English, with quotation marks, in the New York Times, in April 1923, in a translation of a German speech referring to the potential for German state railroads to be bought by American companies.[5] In German, the word Privatisierung has been used since at least the 19th century.[6] Ultimately, the word came to German through French from the Latin privatus.[7]

The term reprivatization, again translated directly from German (Reprivatisierung), was used frequently in the mid-1930s as The Economist reported on Nazi Germany's sale of nationalized banks back to public shareholders following the 1931 economic crisis.[8]

The word became common in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. She was drawing on the work of the pro-privatization Member of Parliament David Howell, who was himself drawing on the Austrian-American management expert Peter Drucker's 1969 book, The Age of Discontinuity.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

[apocalypticink]

00111101.

Waiting for the bus,

A cracked bench, ruined shelter.

There are no busses.

One day I'll ask her just why

She waits for a dinosaur

[thoughtlessarse]

Campaigners say a car crash of different disasters has left the UK with some of the worst bathing water quality in Europe. Anger is rising over the dumping of untreated sewage into the UK’s rivers and seas. The situation attracted international attention at the end of March during the famous Oxford- Cambridge Boat Race. Rowers were warned about potentially dangerous E. coli bacteria in the River Thames ahead of the event. A combination of agricultural runoff and sewage spills now mean the UK is ranked among some of the worst countries in Europe for bathing water quality. Why have its rivers and seas ended up in this state? Why has sewage pollution got so bad in the UK? -Many campaigners track the problem back to the privatisation of England’s water utilities in 1989. Companies were created as regional monopolies, split up by river catchment areas. “The water industry as a whole was privatised in 1989 with zero borrowings,” says founder and chair of campaign group River Action, Charles Watson. Following the 2007-9 financial crisis cheap borrowing saw their debts grow to extraordinary levels. “Today the water industry is carrying £60 billion [€70 billion] of borrowings.” Campaigners say sizable profits were instead distributed to shareholders. Customer bills were also kept low leading to very little reinvestment in infrastructure or improvements to services. Populations have grown since the 1980s and homes are more tightly packed in urban areas. More demand is now being placed on the existing infrastructure. Add on top of this an increasing number of extreme weather events over the last decade - Storm Kathleen was the UK’s 11th named storm of this season.

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