Jeremy Hunt is a terribly confused man. The FT has a report on comments he has made on Thames Water this morning. At the heart of this is a suggestion that:
The company needed “to sort out their own issues.”
They noted that he added:
“What we're never going to do for people who invest in the UK is say that the state is going to insure you against bad decisions made by management or shareholders. That's what markets are about.”
They also report him saying:
It would be “completely wrong” if customers at Britain's biggest water group had to pick up the tab for bad decisions made by its managers or owners.
Poor old Jeremy. He thinks he knows how all this works, and he either clearly does not, or is in denial of doing so.
First of all, there is no market for water. The consumer has no choice. The price the supplier might charge is set by a regulator. And that same regulator has a great deal to say about how the company might operate and what is required of it. If he thinks this is how markets work, he is seriously deluded.
That said, reading between the lines, what he is saying is that there will be no bailout for Thames Water and no extra charges on consumers to keep it afloat.
That, I stress, is a perfectly acceptable position to take. But it leaves one problem, which is that, however it is looked at, the supply of water within the Thames Water region is not operationally possible with acceptable levels of pollution within the framework that regulators permit, politicians will accept, and private capital will finance right now. That circle cannot be squared. There is literally no solution that reconciles those positions bar one, and that is a state subsidy for the massive investment required, with state ownership being necessary as a result.
Is that where Hunt stands? He does not say. As a result, he comes over as a rather confused, figuratively little man, standing on the sidelines of an issue where he holds all the trump cards and the ultimate decision-making power whilst refusing to do anything.
He looks like a Tory minister in that case.
Or, perhaps more accurately these days, a politician from one of the UK's leading parties.
Decisions are required here. Hunt is pretending that they should be made by anyone but him. Why did he ever seek high office?
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Thank you and well said, Richard.
Richard asks why did Hunt ever seek high office. Until he teamed up with a friend to set up Hot Courses and leveraged family connections to secure contracts, his career had been a series of disasters. In addition, Hunt’s extended family have occupied prominent positions in public life in the 20th century. He inherited his seat from his cousin and faces another in the Commons.
Thank you Colonel.
I’ve just looked him up on Wikipedia, the previous MP to his South West Surrey seat was Virginia Bottomley who is now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone. She of course is married to Sir Peter Bottomley, another MP. I don’t think the country will survive this Conservative establishment.
Thank you, Steed.
It’s not just the Tory establishment. Hunt’s cousins Harriet Harman and Kitty Usher sit and sat for Labour, but are neoliberal.
Hunt is also related to the queen mother, Anthony Blunt and Oswald Mosley.
Did you know, Colonel, that Oswald Mosley , along with Lloyd-George, rejected the policy of MacDonald , the Bankers, Conservatives and most of the Establishment to deal with the 1931 economic crisis? He was influenced by Maynard Keynes though there were differences. Mosley had plans for public works which precede Roosevelt’s schemes.
Of course he threw it away by going to the Right.
But I love his phrase about the Labour Party, of which he was a member. Many of its members had anticipated a collapse of capitalism which would lead to socialism but when the crisis happened looked to orthodox economics for a solution.
His phrase was they were like a crowd of Salvationists who confronted with the second Coming of Christ, turned tail and fled.
Hunt is a confused tired cat. I will leave it to readers of this august organ to decide if he is in a pre prtially confused or post totally confused condition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzi3k7K0lFA (funny before, hilarious after 4.30).
It is most interesting to see how what passes for political life in the Uk is increasingly ………surreal, just like the TV series and the extract linked to.
Maybe the Tories and LINO model their approach to gov on surrealism?
This leaves an open question for a couple of million victims of Thames Water: typhus or colera with your water – sir/madam? oh & we have a special offer going only for today with dysentery.
Irony aside – 40 years of Thatcherism and the UK can’t even organise a sensible water system – & the politicos are paralysed/confused.
I liked it…
As with all those whose lives depend on lies and liars the one thing they must never do is to admit the obvious and say they were wrong.
In the case of Thames Water they can never admit that Privatisation does not work.
Admit that and the whole gigantic inverted pyramid of Right-wing lies and the system it has created will crumble in to dust.
So the current approach is to find a bigger liar. Hence Trump, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak with his insanely dishonest scheme to abolish National Insurance without any suggestion of where the cuts to fund it will be made.
I wonder what it costs to drill a borehole in your back garden?
I find myself wondering what Hunt would be saying if Thames Water was a single self-funded person, not a company? I think there would be much condemnation of that person’s failure to do their job. Why is it that a public company is automatically afforded more latitude? There seems to be squeamishness in letting shareholders take the losses for their poor investment decisions. If directors have fraudulently hidden the truth then there might be a case for protecting innocent shareholders, but in the case of Thames Water the failures have been obvious and public for many years. Caveat emptor!
with my former counsellor’s hat on, I have often noted Hunt seems to be almost frightened when asked a more demanding question. He then goes into programmed response mode.
Might just be me.
Ni. I think that too
The country gets what it deserves because most people can’t be bothered to understand how their country’s monetary system works and the role taxation plays in it!
Here’s a good example concerning the increasing uptake of private health insurance in the UK:-
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/18/uk-private-health-insurance-market-nhs-crisis-dental-cover
“Tim Read, author of the report, said: “Demand began to increase in 2018, as the NHS waiting list began to rise out of control. A new Labour government is likely to aim to tackle it but will have limited fiscal headroom to make substantial progress.”
Under the new SAR legislation, Thames Mk2 will be created and will (probably) be debt free, so quite attractive to certain investors. It won’t be ‘state run’ for long.
Maybe…
Another confused and depressing day in the Post Office Enquiry. Nothing comes out of this catastrophe well, and that includes the Law, and Lawyers.
But for irony on such a day of legal revelation and obfuscation (I never knew before how effective a ring binder could be in distracting attention), the British Press takes the biscuit, not just in distracting attention from real news, but in missing the point altogether in the middle of the greatest scandal in the law in the last century, and simply in pursuit of turning everything it can into low-grade, venomous political propaganda, of absolutely no credible, substantive value to anyone. Here is the headline, today in the Telegraph: “How the Left ‘weaponised’ the legal system”.
Somebody needed to weaponise it, because we can see that in the last twenty years, left to its own devices the Law and Lawyers comprehensively failed the Postmasters/Postmistresses; and that is indisputable. And if the Law fails Postmasters/Postmistresses on such a scale, then it is reasonable to deduce it is not much use to ordinary people. If you can afford £10m in fees, then at least in a civil case, it may be of some use to litigants; but I suspect that is quite a small population of non-corporate users.
[This is not a daily commentary, many readers you will no doubt be glad to hear – I do not have the time; but the Post Office, however newsworthy, and is I believe far more important than a single passing scandal; it gives us an insight into the real, unvarnished nature of everyday British business culture, process, and practice; what we actually do, how we behave; not what we say about what we do, or what standards we claim to live by. It is horrific, because there is an abyss between the two versions – and there always has been a gulf between]
Thanks John