It’s possible they’re lying about water nationalisation you know?

At root a market economy is a method of conducting experiments. Which are then tested against a fairly demanding standard - does doing it this way add value? If not then, Ho Hum, let’s try another way.

As with the scientific academy that is becoming so polluted these days this does depend upon everyone agreeing to use the same standards for the testing of whether the method has worked. Comparing like with like and all that, to see which is the best method.

As we all know there’s a lot of shouting going on about the water companies. At privatisation England gained for profit and capitalist companies, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland variations on not for profits and direct government provision. Which does mean that we’ve one of those lovely natural experiments. We can test that government provision against that of the capitalists and see which performs better. That can then inform whether the capitalists or the government is a better solution.

Water companies in England and Wales have averaged five serious sewage spills into rivers or seas every day over the past decade, the Observer can reveal.

Analysis of Environment Agency data has found that the 10 firms recorded 19,484 category 1-3 pollution incidents between 2013 and 2022, the most recent year recorded, an average of one every four and a half hours.

Campaigners accused the water industry of “polluting our rivers and seas at a catastrophic scale”, while Labour said the government had “folded their arms and looked the other way” as the crisis worsened.

OK, maybe this is a good performance, maybe it isn’t. It’s certainly a better performance than decades back but that’s not quite the thing we want to know. Have those government run systems done better than the capitalist run ones? If so then the argument that the capitalists should be dispossessed might carry some intellectual - rather than merely rhetorical - weight. So, what is the comparative performance of the capitalists and the government?

Aaaand, what’s the one piece of information no one at all is putting forward? Quite, that comparative information about how the government run systems are doing as compared to the capitalist. That is, even here where we’ve one of those natural experiments that can be explored to answer the question for us - capitalists or government - no one is in fact arguing those facts.

One reason for this is that the government run systems aren’t under the same legal requirements to actually report. It’s not just people ignoring the data, it’s a refusal to even allow it to be collected.

When that information was collected and compared, ten years after privatisation, it was the capitalists who won. Which is presumably why the information is not collected today. For it would be so terribly inconvenient if the current rhetorical stance for nationalisation were destroyed by ugly facts, wouldn't it?

Now yes, we are quite obviously connected to, were involved with, that original privatisation. If it really didn’t work out then Ho Hum, that’s what happens with experiments. But why is it that no one - no one at all, not even the regulator - is collecting, let alone publishing, the information to let us all know whether it did work or not?

What are the sewage discharge numbers for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? Until we know those we cannot evaluate the experiment, can we?