Thames Water going under

Sun 2 Aug, 18:46 (last edited on Sun 2 Aug, 18:52)

Charlie, I still miss BR to this day. Now there seems to be a wholesale blockage of news from certain parts of the world, almost  as if they just do not exist. That is not good journalism. I do wonder what BR would have said about some of today’s major concerns. 

Thanks for the clip of Lawson’s pomposity and BR’s immediate response. Exquisitely done, as usual!

Sun 2 Aug, 08:56 (last edited on Sun 2 Aug, 11:45)

Rosemary, your comment has brought to mind when they used to do a traffic report just before the 8 o'clock news. This one that Brian Redhead did has stayed in my mind forever, and could also be well applied to the current management of Thames Water:

"There is a 20-mile traffic jam on the southbound M1 at Watford. They are going to concrete over the whole lot and start again."

Priceless. And of course it was delivered totally deadpan as only he could!

Sat 1 Aug, 21:31

Brian Redhead was so brilliant, and was sorely missed. He very often managed to bring Macclesfield into a story, in some way or another, which required an excessive amount of wit and humour. My hometown.

Sat 1 Aug, 16:22

Indeed. I was doing a lot of utilisation of TWIUTS (Things What I Use To Shout). In addition, I have been extremely irritated over about the last month by Thames Water propaganda (particularly on Facebook) telling me that they are investing £6bn cleaning up our rivers. My standard reply to them on this point is that they are only investing 60% as much as they gave back to their damned shareholders (generally considered to be around £10bn). 

Alice, I don't know how long you have listened to the Today Programme; I've been listening since around 1980 or so. The calibre of the presenters of today is vastly inferior to the days of people such as Brian Redhead, who had no compunction about metaphorically spraying the entrails of government ministers across the walls of the studio! You can still hear his famous 1987 "contretemps" with Chancellor Nigel Lawson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p05l2dpw

Privatisation generally has been a disaster, but in the case of Water, particularly so. I am hoping that our new PM will start to clear up some of this nonsense. But I retain my scepticism.

Sat 1 Aug, 15:04

I agree with you, Alice. It was a pathetic interview and a waste of time. Obviously, Simon Jack had been briefed to not ripple the water.  

Sat 1 Aug, 14:03

Did you wake up and shout at the Today programme yesterday as I did?  The BBC gave a voice to Chris Weston, CEO Thames Water and the BBC presenter Simon Jack allowed him to mislead the nation by implying that recovering the ownership of Thames Water would take money away from other public services.  

Hello, BBC, it's the bill payers who pay for water services not taxation, they have no choice.  "We Own It" also shouted at their radios and they have written a clear letter to the BBC asking them not to mis-represent and mislead the public.  Here is the link if you wish to add your name.  

https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/ofcom-bbc-thames-ceo-public-ownership

Yes, there is 35 years of under-investment by the private sector controlled by a politically motivated regulator who didn't allow them to put up bills by as much as was needed given the increase in population size and so there is a huge back-log of work needed which we, as the bill payers, will have to meet.  That is a hard lesson that we've learnt to never again allow private control of essential monopoly services.  Now we've learnt that lesson can we start paying a new publicly owned company to bring our aged water systems up-to-date and require every new housing development to pay for its expansion?  

If you are still a doubter - remember that every time you pay your bill, one-third of your money goes on shareholder dividend and expensive debt and then walk down the road and look at the Evenlode - it looks disgusting.