Sewage dumping

The sewage dumping is really just the publicly visible sign of a 'policy' going/gone wrong.

In general, the State owned corporations of the past were run on a 'cost-plus' basis.

Debt was 'impossible' without Exchequer approval.

Equally , 'profit' was non-existent because the only shareholder was the State.

Then , massive amounts of public money were invested , just to make these 'industries ' ready for the big sell-off , on the cheap.

For a while , that investment coped with the increase of demand which a rising population imposed on it.

Not anymore , that investment has been worked to death , just at a time which requires yet another massive

injection of money to manage the new 'future'.

.

The current local government/council strategy in scotland is to build huge numbers of houses to bring in large amounts of council tax payers

This is matched with zero schools, zero hospitals, zero surgeries and zero dental practices

The extra council tax raised goes to pay for bloated eternally increasing pensions

so the system is working exactly as it should, if you don't care about society

So we privatised electricity generation, a large part of which is now owned by EDF, an arm of the French government, and a lot of our rail freight operation is run by DB SCHENKER, an arm of the German government. What we appear to have achieved is a transfer of what we used to own to foreign governments. Who did this? The same lot who have now voted to allow the water companies (who we also used to own) to pump sewage into the rivers. Perhaps if our civil servants were technically competent we wouldn't be in this mess, but never fear, if the ancient Romans ever invade again our leader will be able to converse with them

Thinking a little more about democracy, it is probably the only thing that has prevented our MPs from privatising our government with the new owners then selling it to the Germans or French.

Some will do anything for money.

JA

The EU experience showed me that there are plenty of high ups in this country who would quite happily hand us all over to overseas interests if the price is right

laissez faire capitalism like socialism needs to be done in moderation for it to work successfully for society

Our job as the little people in a democracy is to stop the big people doing stupid stuff and taking things too far

On the BBC News website political section, there is an item about the amount of sewage being discharged into the rivers and a graphical representation of the amounts.

It does not mention any discharges into the sea but that's where it will all end up eventually.

There were over 3 million hours worth of raw sewage discharged in 2020 into rivers with United Utilities having the majority of 726,450 hours worth of discharges the reason being overflow water during periods of prolonged heavy rain.

As far as I am concerned there should be no raw sewage dumped into rivers. I was surprised that an old pop singer of the 70's.?or was it 80's..? can't remember...didn't like his songs anyway.. ..Fergal Sharkey, who seems to be a 'clean up the waterways' figure head campaigner has voiced his opinion that it is a disgrace.

It seems to me that there has been no concerted effort to address the problem over many years which won't get any better if the infrastructure is left to carry on as normal...with the effect that eventually the rivers will become sewage ways. And here we are lecturing about climate change when every river in England is polluted.