Wet Rot Economics

So, Thames Water's investors have thrown their toys out of the pram, and are refusing any further investment unless water prices are hiked into the stratosphere, despite their woeful performance, and caning an already over-pressed population in an area of these islands where already nothing is affordable except by the rich bastards who don't live there but own most of it. Of course, the vast majority of these 'investors' are not individuals at all, but hedge-funds and pension-funds, all playing a very high stakes game of chance. But this current show of corporate petulance shows them up for what they are: self-entitled [non-] businesspeople who simply imagine that the normal rules of business and society just don't apply to them, and that their acquisition of enormous profits out of wagering other people's money is their's by right, and bugger the economy and the rest of society in the process: an attitude that exemplifies our Government, comprised as it is by a bunch of disconnected bankers and investment fund managers. The clue is in the small print [at least for the hoi polloi] "The value of your investments may go down, as well as up..."

Who, among those of us who occasionally dip into the murky waters of BBC Parliament's coverage of the Commons, can forget, let alone forgive, the sneering insouciance of the Johnson front benches, later splashed over the wider media? The fact of the matter is that the far right of the Tory Party in Government saw in Brexit a fertile territory, ripe for exploitation: a capitalist bean-feast in the offing that they intended to stitch up entirely in their favour on the back of a huge parliamentary majority, the opposition trailing far behind in their wake. But, despite the damage they have managed to wreak during the transition from May to Sunak, via Johnson and the brief lunacy of Truss; their agenda has been partly thwarted, largely by those moderate, old-school Tories from within their own ranks.

The party is now multiply-divided and completely divorced from its electorate, many of whom seem intent to further discombobulate their party of choice by voting Reform UK: the best - possibly only - argument for the first-past-the-post system I can yet imagine. Let them go ahead and tear lumps out of each other: they live in a playground, anyway, why not act like it? As I've said before, the very raison d'être of the Tory Party has ceased to be. It's core values are a middle England that no longer exists. They have even divorced themselves from the vast majority of British business, choosing instead to encourage 'investment' in the country: read giving asset-stripping hedge-funds and global outsourcing giants free rein to suck the very life out of everyday commerce in this blighted archipelago.

Our souls have been sold from out of us by a generation of right-wing, self-entitled posh-boys [and to a lesser extent, girls] in the 'banking & finance' sector, for which you can read high-rolling gamblers, skimmers and thieves, who trade other people's livelihoods on markets they themselves barely understand, and which operate under a set of 'rules' which are as nebulous as they are nefarious. The seeds of their own destruction they themselves have sown, but the damage they've done on the way to their collective, political suicide is going to take some repairing, and the inheritors of this poisoned chalice will have to be mighty impressive in very short order to right at least the most heinous of the wrongs this bunch of abject crooks has committed in so-called 'Government". Oh, and by the way, they will have to properly renationalise the railways, utilities and the NHS. It's the only thing that makes any economic and moral sense...