Implications of water company sale and local Green party press coverage

Not sure about the title of this Blog entry - trying to get two items in under one heading - plus a couple of photos of Ruscombe from my house - the colours of the trees are beautiful.

Anyhow to the first item - news about the sale of Thames Water was disturbing - and worse still Severn Trent is also threatened - see Guardian article. Last week I raised this in a letter to the press (copy below) highlighting what I fear the implications will be - sadly the press seem reluctant to print my letters at the moment - or cover Green party news releases (See how that neatly slides into the second item about local press coverage?).

It is always a battle to get coverage - and sadly when green views are not covered then our democracy suffers. And some local papers are clearly better than others....

To see what you've missed in the press go to the News section of our website. Clearly we don't expect every item we've written to be covered but there has been nothing so far in our local press on David Drews vote not to have an inquiry on Iraq, no Green party perspective on Nairobi, Stern or the Government's failure re the EU Climate Directive, nothing re our news releases on Breast cancer or Countryfile which covered Stroud (largely as a result of Greens pushing the BBC to come here), nothing on the Gloucester Sorting Office or the Defra cuts to the waterways - I could go on but you get the picture....

Over the years we've had various problems re press coverage - see for example here and here. However the press have also been good at times - my own win earlier this year got front page of the Stroud edition. It is clearly a challenging job to get the balance right but for lots of reasons the odds are stacked against green voices. Even The Independent Environment editor apparently said they can't do climate change like the should because the paper is funded by car and aviation industries - ads for holidays etc - yet to be fair The Independent covers the issue better than all the other main papers. Anyhow read Chomsky for more on the press.


Dear Sir/Madam,

Thames Water has just been sold to a consortium for £8bn. Severn Trent is also now seen as a target. Should we worry?

Ownership matters profoundly. The water supply of 11 million people should not be auctioned to the highest bidder, in which the long-term intentions of the buyer are allegedly of no concern to anyone. What will be the new company's attitudes to the investment needed to tackle leakages, conserve water and stop raw sewage being dumped in our rivers?

We don't know - but what we do know is, that once again, the demands of shareholders will come before the needs of customers and the environment. The Australian Bank that led the consortium has been described as "unashamedly and aggressively oriented to making as much as it can as fast as it can". Thames Water users can expect the most rapid increase in prices in Britain, for loopholes in the regulatory regime to be exploited and for "surplus" assets to be sold, not to finance improvements, but to further the interests of shareholders.

Conservative and Labour Governments have got it badly wrong. What we need now is to bring Thames Water and other water companies back into public ownership, properly accountable to the electorate.

Cllr. Philip Booth, Stroud District Green Party.