WORKING people are given instructions to ration while the water companies that have failed to fix their leaking infrastructure and pollute our rivers and beaches continue to make massive profits.

Half of England is now officially in drought. July was exceptionally dry, with the Met Office recording extraordinary rainfall deficits across the country, while rivers, reservoirs, farmland and wildlife have all come under mounting pressure. The Environment Agency has described the situation in parts of England as exceptionally serious.

This isn’t an unusually hot summer — climate change is here and is plain to see.

The global economic order which has caused this climate crisis and the local corrupt privatised water system both expose the bankruptcy of a capitalist system that organises society around private profit rather than human need.

Working people are told to conserve water. Farmers are expected to somehow produce food with parched fields and dwindling supplies. Communities face restrictions. Yet billions of litres are lost through leaking pipes, while water infrastructure has suffered from years of inadequate investment. No major reservoir has been built in Britain since 1992.

Then there is the great hypocrisy of it all.

Water companies are private monopolies controlling an essential resource that nobody can simply choose to live without. Their customers cannot “shop around” in a competitive market. Yet the public is expected to accept the consequences when this system fails.

It is an essential feature of capitalism in our parasitic epoch in miniature: privatise the gains, socialise the losses.

We are told that individual responsibility is the answer. Turn off the tap. Don’t water the garden. Don’t wash the car. Nobody on the left objects to using water responsibly. But why does responsibility only begin at the front door of a working-class household and end before it reaches the boardroom? Needless to say the massive use of water for AI data centres is exempted from any consideration or critique by the political elite.

The climate crisis demands radical and urgent systemic change.

Water should be taken back into public ownership, run democratically and planned according to need. The money currently extracted through dividends, executive pay and financial engineering should instead be invested in repairing pipes, protecting rivers, expanding storage and preparing communities for a hotter, drier climate.

And this cannot be separated from the wider struggle against fossil fuel dependent capitalism.

The same economic system that treats water as a source of profit has spent decades treating the atmosphere as a dumping ground. Energy giants have made fortunes burning coal, oil and gas while ordinary people are left to pay the price through higher bills, damaged homes, failing harvests and increasingly dangerous weather.

The answer is not austerity with a green label.

It is a socialist climate programme: public ownership of energy and water, massive investment in green energy, properly funded public transport, warmer homes, sustainable agriculture and millions of secure, unionised jobs rebuilding the infrastructure we need.

That is not some utopian dream detached from the drought. It is the practical alternative to watching crisis after crisis deepen.

Because the drought is telling us something important.

There is no shortage of resources in Britain. There is a shortage of political will to put those resources under democratic control.

The rain may eventually return. But the climate has been changed by capitalism. We can leave the consequences to the market and allow working people to pay for a crisis they did not create.

Or we can take control.

Water is a human right. Climate stability is a social necessity. Neither should be left to profit.