BACK in December, I suggested Labour would drop its committment to water nationalisation. 

All the signs are there, but we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop — Labour’s leadership are caught between their urge to purge the party of any left-wing commitments, and their inability to argue for things with clarity and determination. 

So just as the private water firms prove they are unfit stewards of our nations fluids by pouring vast waves of human shit and piss into our rivers and seas, Labour decides it has nothing coherent to say.

The case for water nationalisation is this: by privatising public assets, the Tories turned water companies into private monopolies. 

There is no real competition: we all need water, and you can’t have competing taps in your bathroom. 

Instead, private corporations have been allowed to suck money out of the system when they should have been pumping clean water. 

Investors take out dividends instead of investing in repairing the creaking system then lets sewage flow into the rivers and sea, and the clean water leak away from the pipes.

Last July Southern Water was fined £90 million for illegally pumping filth into the sea and rivers. The regulator said it was fined because of “very serious widespread criminality” at the firm. 

Southern Water poured filth into the sea because it did not want to pay for more work at its sewage farms, then hid the pollution from the authorities.

The Environment Agency is now investigating if this criminality is more widespread. There is certainly plenty of pollution.

At the end of March, figures from the Environment Agency revealed water firms discharged raw sewage into English rivers 375,000 times in 2021. Sometimes the water firms get fined.

In January, the Environment Agency revealed Northumbrian Water was fined £240,000 for pouring raw sewage into Coundon Burn near Bishop Auckland. 

Members of the public told the firm about pollution then Environment Agency staff found “a plume of discoloured water” flowing into the river.  

Bricks from the ageing sewer walls kept falling, causing blockages and overflows. Northumbrian Water couldn’t spot these repeated failures because “the company had no maintenance system in place to periodically check” sewers for damage. 

A maintenance schedule is the most basic thing in any industrial system, but Northumbrian Water only fixed things — not always effectively — when the public complained.

Then in February, Northumbrian Water was fined £165,000 because it poured sewage concentrate into the Tyne. 

This time Thames Water connected an out pipe at its sewage works to a surface water drain instead of a foul sewer.

But does Northumbrian Water really care about the fines? In the last three years it has paid out £195m in dividends. 

A few hundred thousand in fines is neither here nor there. Northumbrian Water is owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, so the idea he is worried about a £100,000 fee and some filth in a river in Newcastle is fanciful.

As long as investors can squeeze hundreds of millions of dividends out of their monopolies, they aren’t going to be worried about investing enough to fix the spills and avoid the relatively small fines.

The problem here isn’t regulation, it’s ownership.

But Labour won’t address this because, according to a story briefed by a “senior Labour source” to business paper City AM in February, it wants to “slaughter the sacred cows of Corbynism” by abandoning pledges to nationalise rail, mail, energy and water.

This matches a Daily Mail report from last October that Wes Streeting told the shadow cabinet: “Every day, we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town marketplace and slaughter it until we are up to our knees in blood.”

This sacrifice seems more designed to win over big business and newspaper executives than voters. Polls show they favour nationalisation of key utilities.

The briefed reports also suggest Starmer will announce “meaty” alternatives to nationalisation.

But so far neither the slaughter nor the meat has arrived. Labour seems paralysed, drifting away from nationalisation but announcing no alternative. This leaves the party unable to make any impact.

In January, Labour issued a press release trying to rally growing discontent with the water firms. It opened with the announcement: “Households in England paid out up to £138 every year 2010-21 to cover the cost of water company shareholder dividends — while they have dumped more and more raw sewage into rivers.”

So the problem was clearly outlined as owners profiting from pollution, as the owners “slashed their investment in wastewater management by more than £520 million, comparisons between the 1990s and 2020s show, while they cut £1bn from overall capital investment which could have helped reduce the leakage of thousands of litres a second of treated water.”

But the press release then fizzled out because Labour couldn’t announce any dramatic fix. 

Instead shadow minister Jim McMahon whined: “The system is clearly broken and the government is refusing to listen to Labour’s calls for higher fines for water companies, proper annual parliamentary scrutiny of Defra, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, as well as a proper plan for reducing raw sewage being discharged.”

Some more fines, some “proper scrutiny,” a “proper plan” — nationalisation has clearly been abandoned, but nothing has been put in its place. The announcement had very little impact because there was no substance. A big problem and a small solution.

When Labour abandoned energy nationalisation, just as the energy crisis hit, it did come up with a partial replacement — a windfall tax. 

In my view, it’s weak — a one-off solution to a permanent problem, but it does give them something to say. 

It means Labour looks like some kind of alternative and can capitalise on public anger over fuel bills. But on all the other big economic questions, Labour is in a kind of limbo, unwilling to stick with 2019 manifesto plans — even the popular ones — but unable to come up with any kind of alternative.

Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @SolHughesWriter.