- “Buy” public utility company
- Run it into the ground by extracting all the profits you can without spending anything on maintenance
- Ask government for a bailout
- Profit
Welcome to the American model. Sorry.
Starmer:
We have not privatized enough!
The privatization effort has clearly been sabotaged!
reaching for someone to fire
Trans people no longer get water!
The fuck they doing over there? You good island monkeys? You do realize that the thing you are most famous for is the rain, right? How the fuck do you run out of water when it rains all the time?
Privatisation, combined with a government that seems allergic to actually making there be any penalties for water companies’ fuck ups.
For instance, you mention the excess of rain that the UK receives — well another way the water companies keep fucking up is that when it rains, and the amount of water going down drains is too much for them to process, they end up discharging raw sewage into rivers, polluting many rivers that would otherwise be swimmable (last summer, I lived in a place near a river that was beautiful to swim in during hot weather, but before actually doing so, I checked an online map (from a charity doing data activism) to see if there were any points where sewage was typically discharged from, and if there had been recent instances of this. Turns out that one of the most popular swimming spots was downstream of one of these sewage points)
This is meant to be a thing that is only done in the most exceptional of circumstances, but it’s something that is done frequently, all over the countries, because it’s cheaper to do this than to actually improve water infrastructure. Water companies say “we had to do it because of exceptional levels of rain”, but when occasional bouts of exceptionally high levels of rain is the norm, that excuse is more full of shit than our rivers.
I guess if I was in their service domain, I’d have a large drum filled to the rim with water. Just in case.