British citizens are suffering the consequences of years of privatisation and profiteering. Private companies have turned water from a source of life for all to a source of profit for a few. While British citizens suffer from bad tap water, polluted rivers and seashores where you swim in sewage, companies, their bosses and shareholders swim in your money. Private companies have only one interest: to maximise their profitability for the benefit of people who already have more than enough. It’s time to stop this exploitation and bring water back under public control, public ownership and public responsibility. Water is the source of all our life, not a commodity for companies and shareholders.
The global network of the Blue Community stands with the March for Clean Water, to take part in London on October 26, and all the people and organisations behind it. We support the demands to stop the pollution, to save the rivers and seas, to stop the flow of profits to private companies and instead allow the flow of clean water for all. The billions paid out by these private companies to their shareholders must be returned and used to clean up the mess they have left behind. Instead of being rewarded, shareholders and companies should be punished for the damage they have caused. Private customers and public money must not be used to solve the problems and cover the company’s responsibility. No more money and no more contracts for these robbers! The new government has the chance to make things better and correct the mistakes of the past: Enforcing and tightening the rules will not help, because punishment and penalties always come after the crime has been committed. We must return to a system of prevention and protection, a public system with water under public control and ownership. Follow the positive examples of the Blue Communities of Paris and Berlin: Take your water back into public hands!
The Blue Community global network invites all cities and municipalities, universities and schools, institutions and businesses, trade unions, faith-based organisations and NGOs to become Blue Communities. Join our global network to defend the human right to water and sanitation. Join our demand for water as a common, public good, owned and controlled by public institutions and not commodified for private interests and profit. Stand with us for good quality tap water everywhere, a ban on bottled water and the companies that make money from our most precious resource. Join in, turn blue!
Background
(taken from Blue Community co-founder Maude Barlow’s book ‹Whose water is it anyway?›)
As their water services were privatized in the 1980s, there are no Blue Communities in England and Wales. (Scotland’s water escaped the privatization trend and is still is run by a public water company.) The push to reopen this debate has begun in England.In May 2017, weeks after a media story about Thames Water being fined more than US$25 million for pumping almost two billion litres of raw sewage into the Thames River, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn promised to bring water services back under public ownership if and when his party forms the government.
By September 2018, the Labour Party had committed to a new report called Clear Water: Labour’s Vision for a Modern and Transparent Publicly-Owned Water System. Noting that water bills had increased 40% under privatization and that the private water companies had paid out almost US$23 billion in dividends to shareholders in the last ten years, the party set out its plan to convert to a “new democratically run, public water company.” Even the Conservative party is unhappy: in February 2018, Environment Secretary Michael Gove called for a crackdown on excessive executive pay and the use of offshore tax havens by England’s water companies.
Stay tuned for updates and visit marchforcleanwater.org
