A tanker pumps out excess sewage from the Lightlands Lane sewage pumping station in Cookham, Berskhire, January 10 ,2024
Customers will bear brunt of sky-high interest rates though increased bills, campaigners warn
THAMES WATER’S £3 billion bailout was approved by the High Court today, triggering outrage as campaigners warned of higher bills from sky-high interest payments.
The High Court cleared the loan just weeks before the debt-laden firm was due to run out of money, temporarily staving off the possibility of special administration and temporary nationalisation.
Former Tory PM Margaret Thatcher wrote off the debts of Britain’s water firms when the industry was privatised in 1989.
But Thames Water, which serves 16 million customers, has since siphoned off £7.2bn in dividends, while amassing £19bn worth of debt.
In his judgment, Justice Leech noted that the headline interest rate on the emergency loan, which stands at 9.75 per cent was “very, very high.”
The Financial Times reported that the bailout could incur as much as £800 million in interest and fees.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer (not seen) during a visit to Elective Orthopaedic Centre in Epsom, Surrey, January 6, 2025
BACKING private finance in the NHS should be a red line for any health secretary, campaigners charged today.
NHS England chief Amanda Pritchard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week that the government should “consider” using private capital to fix the NHS’s crumbling infrastructure.
Today, Health Secretary Wes Streeting faced questions on the same programme about a potential return to failed private-finance initiative (PFI) schemes, in which private firms built hospitals and high-interest repayments were made over the long term.
Mr Streeting said that he does not pretend there are not “enormous challenges” because of NHS capital shortfall, and is “very sympathetic to the argument that we should try and leverage in private finance.”
But he admitted that many of the PFI deals “did lumber the NHS with an enormous cost that it continues to bear.”
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Johnbosco Nwogbo, of campaign group We Own It, said: “Support for more private finance in our NHS should disqualify you from being health secretary.
“Many NHS trusts are still spending more on PFI debts than on medicines for patients.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer returns to 10 Downing Street, London, after attending Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, February 12, 2025
PRIME Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been warned off making “ludicrous long-term commitments” that prolong the war in Ukraine ahead of an emergency summit with European leaders today.
The Prime Minister has vowed to “work to ensure we keep America and Europe together” prior to discussing how to respond to US President Donald Trump’s push for an end to the war in Ukraine at the summit called by French president Emmanuel Macron.
The UN estimates 12,456 civilians have been killed during the war that is set to begin its fourth year on February 24.
Sir Keir said: “This is a once-in-a-generation moment for our national security where we engage with the reality of the world today and the threat we face from Russia.
“It’s clear Europe must take on a greater role in Nato as we work with the United States to secure Ukraine’s future and face down the threat we face from Russia.
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A Stop the War spokeswoman said: “Instead of increasing defence spending and making ludicrous long-term commitments to Zelensky, the government should be assisting the peace negotiations and spending our money at home, on restoring the winter fuel allowance, lifting the two-child benefit cap and generally fulfilling its commitments to improve the living standards of the working people of Britain.
“Continuing to push for Ukrainian membership of Nato and pouring money and arms into the country in order to keep an unwinnable war going is utterly reckless and will certainly fail.”
MI5 director general Ken McCallum delivers a speech at Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in west London, October 8, 2024
A VIOLENT machete-armed misogynist and neonazi state agent was protected by MI5, which lied to three courts on his behalf, according to a BBC report today.
The Security Service told judges that it would not confirm or deny the identity of its agents, although it admitted to a BBC reporter that the man, identified only as Agent X, was in fact working for it.
MI5 has now been forced to apologise to the three courts that heard cases relating to X’s treatment of his then partner.
Spy chiefs also lied at a court hearing in a bid to block reporting of Agent X’s crimes.
They said they could not confirm his status, even though a BBC reporter had a recording of a senior MI5 official claiming legal authority to tell her that X was the service’s agent.
It has now issued an “unreserved apology” to the BBC and all three courts, describing what happened as a “serious error.”
British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed ‘catastrophic’ plans to build a third runway at Heathrow | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer appear happy to pursue growth at any cost – including the destruction of the planet
Last weekend the temperature at the North Pole was 20℃ above average, taking it above ice’s melting point in what was described as “a very extreme winter warming event” by Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Four days later, things got worse still. The Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that last month was the warmest January ever recorded at 1.75℃ hotter than pre-industrial times. This is especially worrying since scientists expected temperatures to fall this year as La Nina took over from the previous year’s El Nino. We now face the worrying possibility that the impact of cooling La Ninas might be declining.
Amid these developments, British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, which climate campaigners warn would be “catastrophic”, and reports have emerged that she is also poised to support the opening of the giant Rosebank oilfield in the North Sea, which energy secretary Ed Miliband has described as “climate vandalism”.
Reeves’ drive for economic growth at the expense of the planet is a far cry from the strong green agenda that the Labour Party seemed to favour ahead of last year’s general election.
Labour’s apparent change of heart unfortunately coincides with Donald Trump taking office in the US. The climate science community is now braced for the impact of Trump’s newly appointed Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, running a coach and horses through the US foreign aid programme.
Trump’s administration has also already started removing or downgrading mentions of climate change from federal government web pages – a sign that we are in a worse position than a decade ago after the 2015 Paris climate summit, when there were indications that the dangers of climate breakdown were at last being appreciated at higher political levels.
Now, one of the world’s leading climate specialists, professor James Hansen of Columbia University, says that the international target agreed upon at the Paris summit of limiting global temperature rises to 2℃ is “dead”. The pace of global heating had been “significantly underestimated”, he explained.
The fossil carbon states and corporations with their coal, oil and gas markets, meanwhile, are more certain about their prospects and happy to promote their wares with enthusiasm. There were 2,500 oil, gas and coal lobbyists at the 2023 Dubai COP28 climate summit, four times as many as attended the previous year in Egypt.
If forced onto the defensive, fossil fuel giants have several options. One is to move the focus away from mitigation to adaptation, another is to boost the potential of carbon capture and storage, and yet another is geoengineering.
Then, if all else fails they can fall back on direct air capture; removing carbon from the air once it is dispersed in the atmosphere, rather than as it is emitted. In other words, we should accept the likelihood of an “overshoot” of carbon emissions and hope that future technologies can save the day!
None of these scenarios has any current relevance as none can be developed in anything remotely like the time available given the speed of climate breakdown. There has to be urgent political change at the highest level to engage in emergency decarbonisation.
At a lower level, there is some good news at least. The cost of producing electricity from renewable sources is continuing to fall and the whole process of embracing renewables could accelerate if just one or two countries demonstrated just how quickly change can come.
The UK is in a hugely favoured position to do so, having huge scope to expand land-based wind and solar power as well as offshore wind. That should be one of the British government’s two absolute priorities, the other being a rapid programme of home and workplace insulation.
Further moves would be an immediate tightening up of house building regulations requiring much higher levels of insulation together with grants and loans for home environmental improvements. Transition to electrical vehicles should be accelerated along with much expansion of public transport.
Changes in agriculture must be brought in to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, with methane emission control frequently being overlooked. Air and marine transport must also be subject to far greater emissions control. Any plans to expand existing airports must be abandoned as nonsensical, and subsidies for oil and gas production should be transferred to renewables.
All this, and much more, would cost money, and a lot of it, but there is plenty of that around, readily available from many sources including rigorous control of tax evasion and avoidance, together with new wealth taxes. If climate breakdown is recognised for what it is, the greatest threat to UK security, then the entire ‘defence’ budget should be rethought in this light. More than this, any government that recognises the challenge facing every one of us would see the need to borrow to help fund the response.
So, what of Labour so far? Regrettably, there is little to applaud despite the efforts of a rather isolated few on the front benches and a handful of backbenchers such as Clive Lewis. The party’s brave words of a year ago are difficult to find and Labour is now about growth at almost any cost – destruction of the planet included. The lobby brigade is winning.
Even carbon capture and nuclear power are now hailed by the Labour government as part of the answer even though the first is unproven and the second will take decades to bring in while we only have years, not decades, to make the change.
Perhaps Labour will come to its senses as climate disasters accelerate but it is now a party that has lost any sense of mission. It has forgotten its history, how a Labour government of the late 1940s took on seemingly impossible tasks and succeeded in many respects against the odds. Can the party change now? Perhaps, but don’t hold your breath.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
