But if Welsh Water is worse than English water then what about privatisation?

We think this is a fascinating little piece of digging by the BBC:

Welsh Water has admitted illegally spilling untreated sewage at dozens of treatment plants for years.

The admission came after the BBC presented the water company with analysis of its own data.

One of their worst performing plants is in Cardigan in west Wales.

The company has been spilling untreated sewage there into an environmentally protected area near a rare dolphin habitat for at least a decade.

Welsh Water says it is working to tackle the problems and does not dispute the analysis,

Our word. Gosh. Because of course the English water companies have been subject to a barrage of complaints recently, no? As a result of Feargal Sharkey, Surfers Against Sewage and all water bills in England are to rise substantially to pay for the higher standards they desire. Well, OK, maybe that should happen - as we said. If we all want cleaner water then we’ve all got to pay for it.

But then the other part of the general analysis recently has been that it is private, for profit, water companies to blame for all of this. The dividends taken by the capitalists are the cause. Which does rather run into a slight problem, which is that investment in water rose upon privatisation. As we’ve also pointed out.

Cardigan was particularly bad, spilling for more than 200 days each year from 2019-2022.

The data provided to Prof Hammond showed that Cardigan almost never treated the amount of sewage it was supposed to.

According to its permit it has to treat 88 litres a second before spilling - but had illegally spilled untreated sewage for a cumulative total of 1,146 days from the start of 2018 to the end of May 2023.

"This is the worst sewage works I've come across in terms of illegal discharges," he said.

Oh. Well, that deals with the Richard Murphy critique, which is that the English water companies are environmentally insolvent and therefore must be nationalised. Not for profit and state run companies are worse so what do we do with them?

There is that third example, Scotland. But that’s difficult as Scottish Water is so efficient it seems not to monitor sewage overflows at all. A tad hyperbolic perhaps, but certainly very little.

Which does - or at least should, to the extent that anyone is willing to be rational here - bring us back to that basic discussion of state ownership and privatisation. Not, not at all, which is the best system in theory. Nor shriekings about capitalism, nor public goods to be publicly provided. But which is the most efficient system at delivering what we actually desire? Clean water from the taps, with the least sensible amount of environmental pollution, at the best price possible for those two?

We’ve also run a natural experiment here. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland got different ownership and management systems as a result of privatisation. The spectrum was from most capitalist to least. The best results have also been along that same spectrum - England, Wales, Scotland, NI.

We have, in fact, gone and tested those theoretical speculations. Done it with the water systems of entire nations. And guess what? Capitalism works best. Sure, well regulated capitalism and all that. But capitalism all the same.

Isn’t that interesting?