Last year water companies discharged raw sewage into our seas and rivers on no fewer than 389,000 occasions.
The industry is now promising to invest £10billion over the next 10 years on treatment and infrastructure.
But it will be customers who pick up the bill.
Once again we are paying the price for the Tories’ privatisation of the water firms.
Since being sold off, these monopolies have paid out more than £65bn in dividends to shareholders while their bosses have raked in millions of pounds in pay and bonuses.
Money that should have been spent on updating our sewage system was siphoned off to overseas firms, some of which are based in tax havens. Now they expect the bill-payers to stump up for their greed and incompetence.
In an ideal world the water industry would be brought back into public hands.
If the Government won’t do that, the least it can do is make these firms pay for the mess they have made. They should be forced to forego dividends and bonuses until our rivers and coastal areas are once again clean.
Rise of the bots
The world of work is about to change in dramatic and frightening ways.
Telecoms giant BT yesterday announced it will shed 55,000 jobs over the next decade, with the work of thousands of those people being done instead by artificial intelligence.
This rapid technological change is happening without proper discussion about the implications for the labour market, security and the spread of misinformation.
A recent study warned that as many as 300 million full-time workers in America and Europe could be replaced by AI. Yes, mankind has adapted to previous industrial revolutions – but the disruption is rarely painless.
Great escapes
EasyJet is laying on a record number of summer flights as demand booms.
We cannot imagine why so many people want a break from Tory-run, broken Britain.
