Stop poisoning Britain's waters
A sizeable march floods London's streets demanding public ownership of water utilities.
By Will McMahon (Guest post)
“From the river to sea keep our waters clean’
There were a lot of imaginative slogans on display at the March for Clean Water yesterday (3 November) in London.
As most of the 15,000 marchers followed the guidance to dress in blue, a river of protestors flowed from Vauxhall to Parliament Square carrying banners and placards with slogans ranging from ‘Bring water into public ownership’ and ‘frogs not faeces and fat cats’ to the banner at the front of the demonstration stating ‘water for life, not for profit’. The 3 November March for Clean Water, the first of its kind, can be counted as a success.
Yet it should have been bigger and broader. Whilst admittedly on a much wider issue, the March for Nature last June had over 100,000 attending. The decision by the March for Clean Water organisers to agree to a move of the date - because a gathering of far-right climate change deniers were to be in London on October 26 - was a mistake. An even bigger mistake was to switch the date to a Sunday. That’s the graveyard of many a demonstration because of poor transport. Lots of people demonstrating yesterday were from outside London; some from Cornwall had set off at 3:00 a.m.
WOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER STILL
It would have been bigger still if the trade union and labour movement had been in the middle of the demonstration. Yet, apart from a small delegation from the GMB, there were no other trade union or labour movement banners present on march.
XR were present in numbers, as were the Liberal Democrats and there were a smattering of Green Party banners. You got the impression that the wider labour and socialist movement does not much care about clean water or sewage.
Labour doesn’t either. The government’s first budget since the election produced a real terms cut to day-to-day funding of the Environment Agency, the body responsible to ensuring the rivers, lakes and coasts are kept clean. So it was a huge oversight by socialists and the labour movement not to have strong presence as the climate emergency gathers pace and Starmer’s government fails to deliver.
Starmer himself won the Labour leadership election in 2020 on the back of a promise to nationalise public utilities, including water. He soon reneged on that commitment.
I spent some time giving out leaflets for the upcoming Ecosocialist Conference in London on 7 December. Some said they agreed with the idea, others hesitated asking ‘What is this about?’ I suggested that profiteering from water was at the heart of the problem; this was always agreed with.
THE MARKET SYSTEM DESTROYING NATURE.
In longer conversations it became apparent that many instinctively knew that the market system was destroying nature and that another way forward was needed. But they weren’t quite sure what it should be. I was reminded of a banner and slogan that gained prominence after the 2008 financial crisis ‘Let’s get rid of capitalism and replace it with something nicer instead.’
The absence of the left did not stop the calls for water nationalisation and public ownership receiving the loudest cheers of the day at the speeches in Parliament Square.
The speakers who directly pointed the finger at the corporations who own the water companies also got a loud cheer. An attack on ‘the one-per cent’ also made an appearance. “We are not consumers to prop-up a system that represents just one percent of the population,” said Liz Bonnin, who is the President of The Wildlife Trusts. The speech from Cliff Reid of Thames General Branch of the GMB on behalf of 15,000 water workers called for the re-nationalisation of the water industry.
Chris Packham ended the speeches with a lyrical contribution that did draw most of the strands of the demonstration together and called for action. What was needed, he said, was reform of regulation and replacement for the Water Services Regulation Authority (OFWAT), an end to ‘profiteering’ and for polluters to pay, and for the government to enforce the laws. Packham did not, however, reflect the common-sense of the demonstration, that is, water must be brought back into public ownership and not run for profit.
As the news of the inundation, flooding and body count in the south of Spain grew ever more concerning over the weekend, it is becoming obvious that taking action on the climate emergency will be a central political issue in the years to come.
Protests will only get bigger as the climate crisis become ever more threatening. Socialists need to ensure that they are at the heart of this movement and to pose an alternative to the climate chaos that is already with us now.
Will McMahon is a long-time activist on the socialist left —— he was a leading member of Socialist Alliance and Respect — and has a particular interest in ecology and socialism. https://talkingaboutsocialism.org/ He wrote a longer article on the dirty water issue in THE LEFT LANE on 22 October.
Cover photo from WE OWN IT: https://weownit.org.uk/ Thank you! Other photos by Will McMahon.
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CHECK THIS OUT
THE SOLIDARITY GROWS EVER WIDER AND DEEPER
The above photo was taken on the weekend in the small North Norfolk coastal town of Cromer (pop. less than 8,000) that is famous for its crabs. The pro-Palestine campaigners were showing solidarity with the West Bank villages of Madama and Burin where Israeli settlers and army are preventing the olive harvest, using tear gas, sound bombs and live ammunition.
EVERY DAY KEIR STARMER (AND TRUMP AND HARRIS) ARE SPEAKING FOR FEWER AND FEWER PEOPLE WHEN THEY SUPPORT GENOCIDE.
The North Sea pier at Cromer just north of Norfolk. +++++
ABSTAIN IN 5 NOVEMBER VOTE IN THE US
Because of the war being waged on Palestinians, “ the most moral thing to do in this election is to abstain.” ( Max Geller, an American living in London)
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