This is bullshit! It's May 17th, it's pissing it down with rain outside and it has been almost continuously for the last two months, yet the water companies tell us there is a water shortage so we must all conserve water and expect higher prices in the near future. Twenty odd years ago we were told,as the nations nationalised industries were sold off one by one, that privatisation was in the best interest of the country and that the newly privitised utilities would be more efficiently run and result in better, cheaper services for the customer. So the nations silver was sold off piece by piece untill there was nothing left exept the cheshire cat smiles of the ministers who oversaw the sales as they duly, one by one, took up their lucrative directorships on the boards of the companies they had created. Twenty years later here we are being bled dry (the only dry thing in the UK at present) by those companies as they cream off the maximum take they can squeeze from our already stressed budgets. Where now the 'watchdogs' that were going to look after our interests. Where now the philanthropic industrialists whose had only the consumers interest at heart.

Lets be frank. There is a water shortage now for one reason only - lack of investment. In their pursuit of profit over development the privitised water companies have paid out in fat saleries and bonuses and dividends to  investors that which should have been reinvested in infrastructural improvements to meet the water needs of a growing domestic populace and national industry. Those who have milked our utilities for thier own bennefit have little or no care about meeting these needs - it doesn't effect them where they plan to be going, it's all about me, me, me.

The same story is true if to a lesser extent to our other formerly nationalised industries. British Gas looses no oppertunity to hike up the prices for the smallest reason yet never passes price reductions back to the customer unless the public spotlight falls on it. Btitish Telecom's first act on privitisation was to go around to every phone booth in the country and to block up the 5p payment slots thus raising the price of a call-box call 100% in one fell swoop - and it has pursued a policy of avericious price rises ever since. The rail network was divided into such a mish-mash of crossed and interlinked companies that no-one could be sure of who was responsible for what in this most important of the need for safety based industries. The electricity companies have been sold off to french and russian buyers such that the vast profits generated do not even stay within the confines of our own country and now with nothing left to sell our current government is turning it's greedy eye's to the one thing left from which it may be able to wring a nice little post-government earner for it's boys - the Post Office. Anyone in any doubt that the future of the Post Office is in private hands should take a good look at the 'softening up' process that has been ongoing via tha national media for the last few years (I include the last Labour government in this as well - they were really Tories with red ties when you look at their record). "One in Three letters Delivered Late", "10% of packages Lost by PO" etc, etc. scream the headlines every few weeks or so. "Post-men demand massive salery rises" we are told as the uncompromising communist union leaders are paraded before ranks of tattoed PO cap wearing hoodlums on the national news programs. In reality the idea that  a scource of vast potential wealth may be passing them by without being tapped is one that the Torie mentality cannot stomoch and they'll be beggared if they don't have a good go at getting their grubby mitts on to it.

There was a time when it was understood that certain things were too important to be left in the hands of the market to oversee, whose sole motive was that of profit. Thus the idea of a 'mixed economy' of public and private ownership was born where the basic utilities, water, electricity, gas, tele-communications, rail-travel etc were held in public hands to be run on a best-interest for all basis, and the other industries, perhaps less fundamental to peoples well-being, were left in the hands of the market to generate profit from. And the system worked well. It was not without flaws but in the main it functioned well and provided for peoples needs in a way that did not push them to the edge of penury. Now all this is gone. The market rules and we find ourselves under the shadow of a master who cares little for our well-being or future prosperity or indeed meeting the needs of future generations that will need to avail themselves of these services. Well I have a radical idea. Take them all back. Begin a program of re-nationalisation of the key utilities without delay. Pay such compensation as is deemed appropriate to individual shareholders who have found it appropriate to profit on the backs of the people who have born the cost of dividend payments in the form of both reduced services and raised prices. It's a rule that you can't go back in life - but some rules are made to be broken and this is one of them!