"Running dry – Protecting the right to water in Europe"

 

[Greenwich Park parched by the heat and lack of rain on 12 August 2022. Photo by Alisdare Hickson. Source: Wikimedia Commons.]

"Water privatization has catastrophic results, as shown by France and the United Kingdom. Citizens across Europe are increasingly opposed to the liberalization of essential services. But with climate change worsening droughts and heatwaves, public ownership is only the first step towards just and effective water management.

European policy has traditionally treated water as an abundant commodity to be extracted for profit. The severe droughts recently experienced in Europe indicate that this era of abundance is over and have brought home the true value of water as a precious and scarce resource. It is time to look at water in a new light.

This new situation requires a radical change in our approach to water policy and management. Former attempts to integrate water resources into the European single market now appear short-sighted at best and potentially disastrous. In order to build the resilience necessary to overcome the climate-related challenges ahead, we can no longer allow water to be exploited by market forces for private gain. The neoliberal water policies in place in many European countries need to be reversed, and water must be subject to public or commons-based governance. Only in this way can we build resilient water systems and keep water universally available and affordable.

Privatization and resistance

The current era of water privatization first began to emerge in the 1980s when, under the conservative rule of Margaret Thatcher, the UK government oversaw the transformation of water facilities into private assets. Water was privatized in England and Wales in 1989 as part of a wider liberalization agenda for public services and resources. Ten regional water authorities and their proprietary infrastructure were completely transferred to privately owned companies. As a result, water companies became ‘permanent regulated monopolies’, facing ‘public sector levels of competition and risk’ with ‘private sector levels of profit and return’.1

The result was a complete collapse in investment in water infrastructure with serious consequences for water losses. Private company Thames Water, which provides water to the London metropolitan area, has been criticized for its inability to deal with huge leaks from its pipes. The estimated water loss is 600 million litres per day – almost a quarter of all the water it supplies. This quickly becomes a severe problem in the context of drought-induced water scarcity. Thames Water and Southern Water, another large water and wastewater company, have also been criticized for unacceptable levels of sewage pollution and spills, which seriously affect both valuable ecosystems and public health."

Read more (especially about Italy and remunicipalisation of water in France) from source at Eurozine here.

Maria says not so fast! -- A voice from rural Spain

 (Definitely worth reading to the end...)

"Last Wednesday, I went to refill my blood pressure medication. The pharmacist told me that the prescription had run out, and that I needed to renew it. So, when I came home, I went online and tried to make a phone appointment to renew my medications. But there was no opening until today, Tuesday. 

Last night, I got a call from a phone number with so many digits, that it was either the health service, or the bank. It was the local clinic, telling me that my appointment to renew my prescriptions was cancelled, and that it would be rescheduled for the 3rd of August, next Tuesday. The problem? There were no doctors in the afternoon this week. 

Excuse me? No doctors? There are no substitutes for doctors who are on a much-needed vacation? Or who are sick themselves and can't come to work? Exactly. There are no subsititute doctors. At the end of July. With tourists teeming all over the place. With the probability of more than one serious accident happening in the afternoon. Oh, but the receptionist (substituting, himself, for the regular one) explained that in that case there was a doctor on call. One doctor..."

Read on here.

"Let there be profits" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

  

September 14, 2010, 5pm. I’m pacing in little circles outside an office on Carrer Igualada in Vilafranca del Penedes.

I’m the last person in a queue.

There’s half a dozen people in front of me and we are waiting for the door to this electricity company to open. (Does it really matter which energy company? Is there any real difference between them?)

Finally, we are inside the tiny waiting room. The four seats are taken so I stand next to another customer. We are “esteemed clients” a sign on the wall says.

After 20 minutes I get a seat and after another 25 minutes I am sitting in front of a harassed employee named Xavier. We have come to know each other’s faces quite well over the last 6 weeks since I’ve had to persist in my visits there every week. He is always polite, sympathetic and vaguely sad. He shrugs a lot. I tap the bones under my eye. (They’re called sockets too aren’t they?)

November 2, 2010. The electricity in the house we bought (with a bank mortgage) in a small town near Vilafranca back in August is flicked into life. Here it’s called ‘la luce’ or ‘light.’ Let there be light. Please.

Fast forward almost a decade to May 4, 2020. A few months into the Covid emergency, this power company reports “a more than doubling of first-quarter net profit to 844 million euros compared with 363 million in the same period last year.”

January 2021. Media report: “Electricity bills increased by 26.7% in the first days of the year compared to the same period of 2020, according to consumers' rights association Facua.” This follows frequent power outages across Catalonia, with municipalities affected including Barcelona's lowest income neighbourhoods of Raval, Badalona and Torre Baró. 

June 5, 2021. A demonstration in the Catalan capital’s Plaça de Catalunya is in full voice. The gathered are protesting what they say is clearly going to be a jump in electricity prices coming from a new peak and off-peak billing system.  A media source says: “The increase could be 8.5% for some households but as high as 27.3% for others depending on the supplier.”

The Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) is arguing that small households and businesses are likely to suffer the most. Those who work at home during the day (including this journalist) are also at risk of increased energy costs. Social media jokes about ironing after midnight don’t seem especially funny to me.

But a promise has been made. There will be “savings for 19 million consumers already on a plan without hourly rates.” To me, this is about as believable as their other promise. The 9 million customers who had hourly based pricing will supposedly now have their bills rise by only around €2 a month. 

What seems more probable to me is that with the Covid 19 pandemic starting to show signs of fading, the three big energy companies are using this time as a good excuse to create a so-called “new normal.” Apparently, normal service (ie. poor quality service) is to be resumed as soon as possible, except at higher prices for millions of consumers who are unable to afford it. 

There is of course a simple solution to the above. It’s called nationalisation. A government, elected by a majority of voters, runs an infrastructure system on behalf of all the population, for the populations’ sole benefit, not for investor profit. It would guarantee lower prices. 

Radical? I don’t think so. It’s been done plenty of times before.

 

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2021.]

"How a wave of municipalisations in Europe is challenging privatisation"

  
"A wave of privatisations made its way from the coast of Britain towards the Continent in the 1980s; gaining momentum after the fall of the Berlin Wall, privatisations became a tsounami hitting the shores of Europe in the 1990s, east and west. 

Former state monopolies in “strategic sectors”  were privatised for all sorts of reasons: to encourage innovation, promote economies of scale, reduce public debt, attract foreign direct investment and improve productivity. Privatisation was now conventional wisdom.

Goods formerly considered public – water, transport, housing, energy, electricity, telecommunications, waste treatment, health, education – were treated as commodities. Under the guise of consumer protection, often, privatisation eroded the quality and accessibility of public goods and services.

Be that as it may state-owned companies and institutions in Europe have largely become passé, although they are very much the norm in China, India, Russia, and other emerging markets. However, in Europe too,  there is movement in the opposite direction, that is, towards public ownership.

A recent study published by the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) reveals a pattern of return to public ownership...

Read more from source here.

"Brexit blues" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Protesters in London, January 2019. EFE] 

My wife and I are just a few weeks away from being what amounts to illegals in a country (in fact, an entire continent) where we have lived for the last 4,600 days.

Both of us having a British parent has meant that we’ve been able to have most of the rights and responsibilities of a European citizen and our (Australian only) teenage son has had no legal problem either.

With Brexit this is all soon to change for us and an estimated 308,000 Brits in Spain.

Another million or so across the rest of the European Union are set to face the same uncertain status unless the British government finally delivers on its promise to fully safeguard its passport holders living in the EU. 

Quite simply, there is growing alarm, anger and feelings of abandonment across this very disparate group of individuals.

But how and why did we get to this point in the first place?

It’s worth remembering that the cause of Brexit was an advisory referendum. 

It was a public vote called by former Conservative prime minister David Cameron more than two years ago. 

He made the referendum happen purely (in his mind) to prevent the growing popularity of UKIP (right-wing anti-Europeans) and to shore up his own leadership in a party with a range of strong opinions on Britain being an EU member.

Cameron did not design this referendum because of public pressure in the United Kingdom. 

In fact, only 37% of the voting population ended up choosing to cast their vote in favour of leaving, though this was almost 52% of the total vote.

As senior EU officials have in fact recently confirmed, Cameron believed that his then coalition partner, the Liberal-Democrats, wouldn’t agree to an in/out Brexit referendum. 

When Cameron won an election and then found himself governing without the Lib-Dems, his hand was forced by powerful elements in his party and the business sector, despite Cameron being publicly pro-Europe. Also mistakenly, he expected a victory anyway.

So, the awful mess we are in now was started by the Conservatives and is being continued to this day by the Conservatives. I am not going to talk about those who promoted Brexit with, what Donald Tusk rightly called “not even a sketch of a plan to carry it through safely.” 

I am not going to talk about the countless thousands of working people who have already lost jobs to Brexit-era closures and relocations, or about a likely 750,000 more unemployed to come.

I am also not going to talk about the loss to UK schools, hospitals and service industries of EU nationals, forced out by a government pursuing a “hostile environment” policy toward immigrants. 

I could also mention those Europeans who felt it necessary to leave Britain because of the greatly increased bigotry and discrimination against many of them that Brexit has unleashed.

Instead, I am going to identify the single biggest reason why the pro-Leave forces won the referendum. Apart from blatant lies, scaremongering and running a campaign that spent illegally, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and others took clear advantage of their own government’s austerity policies.

Massive social welfare cuts, hospital privatisation, school budgets slashed, starving local councils of funding and large scale vital infrastructure being left in ruins. 

All this together created sections of the country who were itching to make a protest vote and punish the government, Europe, immigrants: these were who Leave leaders identified as being at fault for what was in reality the everyday results of the harshest forms of austerity. 

This was why Britain needed to “Take Back Control”. This finger-pointing was enough. That simple slogan.

And now today, look at the result.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2019.]

"The dangers of the sell-off" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

["Grandpa Mark"]

  A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the calendar.

In Australia, that faraway land that has the reputation of a kind of paradise according to some people here in Catalonia, the national government is up to its usual dirty tricks. 

Someone working at the public's expense recently discovered a sixty six year-old grandfather named Mark Rogers who the government solicitor is threatening with legal action if he doesn't close down a website he runs.

His alleged crime? 

Not corruption, child-pornography or even defrauding bank customers. Rogers, volunteering his own time, dares to host “savemedicare.org” in an attempt to keep the Australian health system in public hands. 

The ultra-conservative Turnbull government down-under has told “Grandpa Mark” that he has broken copyright law through 'misleading or deceptive' use of the Medicare “brand” logo.

The fact that Medicare exists not as a brand but as a taxpayer-funded organisation which is responsible for allocating resources to hospitals has been ignored by the Aussie media. 

What they have rightly pointed out though is that the government is falsely using the law to intimidate a critic of their policy of selling off Medicare to corporations with big profits from sickness as their sole motive. 

Rogers aim is simply to keep the universal health system for all and to publicise the myths that right-wingers in Australia are spreading about Medicare being supposedly 'unaffordable.'

Meanwhile back on this half of the globe, in a progressive move the Slovenian parliament has adopted a constitutional amendment that declares their country's abundant clean water supplies are 'a public good managed by the state' and 'not a market commodity.'

Strangely though, the same centre-left government is planning to employ private security firms to help “manage the flow of thousands of migrants and refugees” travelling through the country toward northern Europe.

If contracting out police work seems a reasonable idea, I would urge you to read British journalist Polly Toynbee's wonderful book about life for the low-paid (titled “Hard Work.”) She spent time in various jobs where, amongst many other shocking discoveries, she found that all across their National Health Service, private agencies were originally used to solve short term staffing but quickly became dependent on them.

The agencies were quick to realise this relationship of dependency so colluded to keep pushing up their fees without paying staff any more than sub-living wage rates. As a result, public service 'managers' were completely unable to manage their teams because they were all being directly employed by companies outside the system.

This has been a business arrangement that only benefitted the companies. And it has now been true for a decade and a half, leaving taxpayers as well as the government and these low-paid workers trapped without a trace of value for money - the exact thing that privatisation is supposed to be so good for.

[This article was was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2017.]

Townspeople halt attempt to sell-off public water

A promising new current affairs publication and website La Marea features the story of this attempted privatisation gone wrong.

Under the slogan, "Water is a service, not a business," thousands of villagers in Laguna de Duero (Valladolid) have successfully stood up for almost a year to their mayor's plan to privatize the water supply in the municipality.

Read more at La Marea here.

Rubbish, water and the General Strike

  [Photo: Richard van der AA/Demotix/Corbis]

Prompted by regular reader Tom (again) I have been thinking about a few related things. 

His link to a north American article about “dumpster diving” in Spain (ie, people searching through those large rubbish bins for food/items to use or re-sell) reminded me of the day I first saw this happen in this country with my own eyes. 

It was near our local shops quite early in the morning; still semi-dark and I noticed a quite well-dressed man with his head and arms stuck inside a big green rubbish hopper. He had already collected a few things and when he saw me walk past he was clearly ashamed.

This happened about 4 years ago, just as the huge and still-continuing economic “crisis” had just begun. It has now become a regular sight during the daylight hours too, and is just one undeniable symptom of the desperation and hardship that is now equally common.

Now that sense of resentment and frustration is to be channeled into another National General Strike which is to be held tomorrow, the 14^th of November.  

There is a lot to strike about at the moment. Personally, the quiet privatization of greater Barcelona’s water supply by the Catalan government is one that stirs me into anger. We are supposed to believe the government’s hollow assurance that it “will continue to be a public service.”