I have just received my water bill, £700, and it set me to thinking.

I remember the debate that took place about the privatisation of the utilities. The whole debate concentrated on the question of whether the utilities would have been better run in public control, or in private control.

On privatisation, the water utilities sold off all the ‘excess’ reservoirs at a nice profit. They then discovered the reason we had all those ‘excess’ reservoirs, is because the system is so leaky. The water companies now claim we need to give massive more funding to the water companies, so they can bring the system up to standard, which will conveniently provide them with a massive profits for the foreseeable future. The simple thing is, they shouldn’t have sold off the excess’ reservoirs. They weren’t in excess.

But that made me think, that really shouldn’t have been the question of the debate. The question should have been, should we have democratic control over a necessity, water, or should it be in the hands of a minority to use to make profits? Quite obviously, we should have democratic control.

Then comes the question, can you run things correctly when democratically controlled? And my question to that is, why not?

Sure the nationalised water utilities could have been run better, but the answer to that was more democracy not less. We needed to bite the bullet, and take responsibility, for the necessary redundancies, investment, whatever the water utilities needed. We cannot blame the bankers, profiteers and the politicians etc for exploiting the situation, if we the citizens are not prepared to take democratic responsibility for our water.

Nationalise and rationalise democratically.

£700 ?!?!

I pay about €150 (£130) for the whole year.
What on earth are you doing with it? Do you run a paper mill?

And what has the price of your bill got to do with the rest of your post?

As a matter of interest, I think that water should be provided at a nominal charge as far as it is a necessity. Where I live, it is very cheap for the first 20 cubic metres in the charging period, then gets more expensive on a sliding scale. Moderate users have cheap bills.

Sewage should be part of the local services provided by the town halls.