Many believe Christianity has become largely irrelevant but listen up over Easter and you may find it’s still very much in our thoughts.
With our Third World train service forcing millions to travel in cars, take to any major British road, and as the lengthy traffic jams form you will hear from rolled-down windows: “Jesus wept… Good Lord, this is painful… Christ, get a move on.”
And when news comes on the radio about the latest group of privatised industry bosses holding this broken country to ransom you’ll hear screams of “how come no matter how many times we crucify these scumbags they always rise from the dead?”
This Easter it’s water company bosses. Again. As figures show they dumped raw sewage into our rivers for a staggering 3.6million hours in 2023, double the previous year, annual bonuses paid to CEOs of the five worst-offending firms totalled £4.1m.
Meaning, across all the UK’s water companies, bosses have awarded themselves £25m in bonuses since the last election. That’s a reward for turning our rivers and seas into such open-air toilets that if your dog goes in for a swim today the chances are it will end up coming out like a chocolate bunny.
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Since the industry was privatised in 1989, shareholder dividends (much of them paid to foreign pension companies) have reached £72billion. Which is double the amount the firms have invested in upgrading our decrepit sewerage system. Yet the same companies claim to be in so much debt that customer bills may have to rise by 40% to clean up their mess.
In short, we have allowed them to take our dumps, dump them in our rivers, then dump on us from a great height. These cosy monopolies don’t need to worry about competition so they can slash costs, raise prices and under-invest, knowing that the government regulator is a joke.
But maybe not as laughable as their excuse for doubling the amount of sewage dumps last year – it rained a lot. This is Britain. A wet little island in the North Atlantic where rain is the major topic of conversation. It never stops. Consequently the water companies’ main raw material is cheap and plentiful.
So three cheers for Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation which reputedly liberated us from the evils of public-owned utilities. How is that panning out 35 years on? As the brilliantly tenacious environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey puts it: “We have been scammed. This whole industry has become nothing more than a legitimate rip-off.”
Which is why Labour’s U-turn on bringing our most precious natural asset back into public ownership is as baffling as it is shameful. Still there is some hope. So many parasites have been allowed into the Thames by the corporate parasites that the winners of today’s Oxbridge Boat Race have been warned not to jump into the toxic river.
All we need now is for the Henley Regatta to be called off and e-coli to get into the ice at Royal Ascot and those at the top may be forced to act. In the meantime, instead of calling Britain’s monarch King Charles III, let’s call him King Charles The Turd.
And at the Last Night of the Proms let the patriotic carousers wave their Union Jacks and proudly bellow “Stool Britannia, Britannia stools the waves”.
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