How Tory neglect flooded Britain's rivers with sewage

From The Guardian 

As the election campaign rolls on in the UK, our colleagues have been producing a bunch of great data-driven reporting.

This feature traces pollution along the Thames, and reports that for voters, including many in Tory heartlands, the polluting of Britain’s rivers is among the most egregious legacies of 14 years of Conservative rule.

There’s also some great visualisations on which high-profile Conservatives might lose their seats, and how the Lib Dems might double their seats despite fewer votes.

Some of these stories also feature a lovely approach of hand-designed collages, which you can read about here.

The Conservative Party (The Tories, from the Irish word tóraidhe, modern Irish tóraí, meaning "outlaw", "robber") privatised the publicly-owned water authorities, with the consequences we see today.

The Tory water privatisation scam

 Dunno who created this.  Kudos to them.

And the Right wonder why socialism is once again respectable, and why young people are moving Left.

Privatisation has failed

Electricity poles in Melbourne. ‘There has never been any strong economic evidence that privatisation delivers benefits to budgets.’ Photograph: Diego Fedele/AAP

From The Guardian

Daniel Andrews’s plan to re-establish a publicly owned state electricity commission is not just proof that privatisation has failed, it’s proof that the politics of privatisation have failed.

It is no accident that the Victorian premier is using a brand name from the past for his investment in the energy generation of the future. And it is no surprise that he is focussing on public provision of an essential service during an election campaign. The Australian public never liked privatisation as much as their political class.

Andrews is not alone in seeing the economic and political benefits of nationalising the key infrastructure on which Australia’s economy and community are built. Malcolm Turnbull created Snowy 2.0, Barnaby Joyce is enormously proud of the publicly owned inland rail corporation, and the Queensland government – having failed in prior bids to privatise its electricity generators – recently announced $62bn worth of new public investment in renewable energy via its state-owned electricity companies.

Economic theory provides no clear rules about which assets are best owned by the government and which are best owned by the private sector. The simple fact is that different governments, in different countries, at different points in history, have made quite different decisions about what governments should own, run and sell.

Just as there’s no strong economic case for what assets governments should own, there has never been any strong economic evidence that privatisation delivers benefits to budgets either.


While governments keen to sell the assets built up by their predecessors always focus on the short-term reduction in public debt, they rarely talk about the long-term impact of lost revenue streams in the decades ahead.

Back in the 1990s, Jeff Kennett sold off Victoria’s electricity assets for $23.5bn, but it has been estimated that last year alone the electricity industry made $23bn in profit from Victorian consumers and businesses. Whoops.

The productivity benefits of privatisation are just as sketchy.

While the rhetoric of privatisation revolves around the greater innovation, efficiency and spending discipline of the private sector, the reality is that since the trend towards privatisation began, the growth in middle managers and salespeople in Australia’s utility sector has been extraordinary. For example, between 1997 and 2012 the energy, gas and water sector – where most of the privatisation was taking place – saw its sales force grow from 1,000 to 6,000, its business, human resource and marketing numbers swell from 2,000 to 9,000, and the number of general purpose managers explode from 6,000 to 19,000. The number of technicians and trade workers, on the other hand, increased by just 28%.

While the high prices and low quality of privatised services is widely understood, one of the least visible but most important harms associated with the change in ownership of public assets is the impact on apprenticeships and skills.

Back before economic rationalism and neoliberalism entered the minds of Australian politicians, government-owned corporations employed tens of thousands of young apprentices each year, most of whom left to work in the private sector when they finished their on-the-job training supported by formal training in publicly run “tech colleges”.

These days most of the public corporations and public tech colleges have been replaced with private companies, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the privatisation of training has not delivered an increase in its quality, but a so-called skills shortage.

Given that companies like burger chain Grill’d were the largest recipient of the former Coalition government’s “boosting apprenticeships commencement” wage subsidy scheme, and that privatised training colleges had to be banned from offering free iPads to trick vulnerable people into enrolling in inappropriate courses, it should come as no surprise that despite spending record amounts on training, Australia needs to look overseas to provide workers with a huge variety of skills, including electricians, bakers and bricklayers.

Privatisation has made a mess of Australia’s vocational training system. But Andrews’s plan to create new “tech schools” to introduce more students to more trades before they leave school is evidence that governments are starting to believe the economics and politics of old-fashioned public spending is a better way to fix problems.

Direct public investment in essential services through old-fashioned entities like Victoria’s State Electricity Commission and our school system allow governments to directly solve lots of problems at once. Not only can the Andrews government directly invest in the renewable energy that decarbonising economy clearly needs, it can play a direct role in shaping the wages, conditions, training and gender balance of its workforce. Likewise it can ensure that the physical investments and labour force training are located where they make the most economic, social and environmental sense.

Governments can’t and shouldn’t do everything. But after decades of privatisation, deregulation, outsourcing and the creation of private markets to replace public regulation, it’s positive to see a state government not just investing directly in public solutions, but being so public and proud in the process.

Let’s hope the federal government drops the rhetoric of building a “green Wall Street” to fund environmental protection and its “accord” with the superannuation funds to build public housing and instead spends some money protecting wildlife and building houses. It’s not high finance, but it’s a lot cheaper and more effective.

The dotty Right and dirt-cheap renewables in Oz

Note that the blue areas in the west of the country are deserts, with normally very low rainfall. 
Even a small increase creates a record high.  

The "Liberal"/"National" coalition is in power at Federal level in Australia.  A far-right minority within the government has hijacked the party and caused it to veer to the right, especially for climate change policy.  They have scuttled down the rabbit-hole of denialism and coal worship.  The L/NP has also, over the last 30 years embraced the mantra of privatisation, selling off Federally owned and state-owned bodies such as banks and electricity utilities.  This has led to a dramatic rise in retail electricity prices, taking our electricity costs to more or less double the USA's. 

Meanwhile, the "National" Party, formerly the Country Party, which has (or had) its strength in the bush, has stopped caring about the welfare of farmers and essentially now works only for the interests of coal and gas resource companies.  Even in the bush, perhaps specially in the bush, people know that global warming is happening, because they experience the effects of record temperatures in summer, record droughts, and record floods.  And they know that burning more coal will just make things worse.  Recent Federal by-elections and state general elections have shown conclusively that the public wants action on climate change.  So the L/NP government is pretending to tackle the issue.  It has threatened to force electricity utilities to cut prices (how?) has stated again and again that Oz's emissions are falling, in the teeth of the evidence, and is still planning to subsidise new coal power stations, which it needs to do if they are to be built at all, because coal is now so much more expensive than renewables.

Dear L/NP--you want to cut electricity prices? Switch to renewables. Snowy River (owned by the Federal government!) recently stated that it got average prices of $40/MWh for its tenders for wind and solar power. That's for the whole tooty: capital cost, depreciation, interest charges, and maintenance.  Of course "fuel" is free. They also stated that the fuel cost alone (i.e., before maintenance) for coal-fired power stations was $56/MWh. Even adding the cost of "firming" (i.e., converting the variable output of wind and solar to the profile offered by fossil fuels) renewable electricity would cost just $60-$70/MWh. (Source)

This is below the wholesale electricity price, which is $93/MWh in Queensland, $104/MWh in NSW and $128/MWh in Victoria. (Source)

So if we switch to renewables, we would halve wholesale electricity prices.  And tighter regulation of the (now) privately owned grid would help push down retail electricity prices on the back of that.

What is it about the Right that they remain so ignorant?

Their cretinism goes deeper than that.  To show just how much they love coal (who is crossing their palms with silver, I wonder?) they plan to build more heavily subsidised coal power stations to replace Oz's aging generation fleet.  They can't stop the shift from coal globally, but they think that if somehow they support coal in Australia, then world coal demand will hold up. A kind of magical realism.

But it won't, for two reasons.  (Need I say it?)

The first is the obvious one: although the Nats (and the rabid right wing of the Libbies) continue their simple-minded faith in the climate denialist cause, the rest of the world (apart from the quite demented Republicans) has moved on. The rest of the world knows that climate change is happening, that we are causing it, that a major cause is burning coal.  Recent heatwaves in Europe and China have made the fact of global warming obvious.  

The second is that renewables are cheaper than coal, in some places (US/Australia/India) cheaper than the fuel cost of coal power. So even if the increasingly demented L/NP funds Ozzie coal power stations it won't make a blind bit of difference to world demand. Coal is finished.

Rational people would accept this, and start planning for the new reality. Not the L/NP! There was a time when the Right side of politics was rational and pragmatic and it was the Left who believed in Utopian ideals. Now the Right has discarded logic, truth and common sense, and digs deep into the poisonous pit of delusion. It will end very badly for them.