The Class Politics of Rising Water Bills

In his famous essay on enshittification, SF author Cory Doctorow argues the more capital gets its claws into anything, the more the charges ramp up as the quality of service plunges. He wrote it with "tech" in mind, and it's undeniable that as the owners of social media platforms have worked out how to make money from them (or not, as the case may be), they've become increasingly irksome, invasive and, frankly, dull. But Doctorow's enshittification might as well be about the fate of essential public infrastructure that governments of all stripes have sold off over the last 45 years, in the name of "efficiency".

Consider Ofwat's decision to allow the water companies to increase bills over the next five years well above inflation. By 2030 and depending on where one lives, bills are going up between 21% and 53%. The regulator argues this is necessary to secure over £100bn of investment in water supply and infrastructure, which coincidentally cuts and pastes from the pleas water companies issued in July when they first asked for big rises in bills. After decades of underinvestment and bumper payouts to shareholders, they have a cheek. As WeOwnIt notes, only 65% of these price rises will be spent as advertised - the rest will go on servicing the sector's considerable debts and paying out dividends.

The politics of this are awful for Labour. They were elected on the promise of reducing household bills by £300, and right now the chance of that happening by the end of this parliament is next to non-existent. And a crisis for Labour is an opportunity for others. "Reform are now among those calling for the renationalisation of Thames Water, who might increasingly pitch left on issues the Tories can't and won't move from. With their only principle being the increase in Nigel Farage's bank balance, they're not going to allow something like consistency get in the way of making a political splash. It's there for other forces too, such as the Greens and the new left formation getting ready to go. Labour could do the very easy thing by ending the con and taking them out of private ownership just as Keir Starmer once promised. It would be a popular measure with the public, earn them some badly-needed kudos for doing the right thing, and the only people in opposition would be the Tories.

When asked Labour ministers always say renationalisation costs too much. In October, Steve Reed said it would cost £100bn - a figure that's been widely debunked. The actual estimate of a conventional buy out is a comparatively paltry £14.5bn. But this isn't the only model available. Straightforward swaps for gilts is one method. Another is passing legislation that fixes the price per share the government would pay - something done routinely by compulsory purchase schemes without bringing British capitalism crashing down. Or, thanks to the public's attitude to privatised water, a straightforward nationalisation without compensation should be on the table considering how shareholders have profited from the running down of the infrastructure since the Tories sold them off. Labour knows these options exist, but prefer to play clueless and repeat the lie of prohibitive cost when they do. As there are so many political upsides, why are Starmer and co holding out?

As always in Britain, it's the class politics. There are two aspects here. Like the Tories, Starmer's government wants to manage expectations and the easiest way of doing that is by saying no. The slide from Starmer's Corbyn-lite platform to the very thin manifesto Labour went into the general election with was a concerted effort at downplaying hopes for something different. Saying you're not going to change much, and proving it with an unnecessary and mean-spirited attack on the elderly has done the trick, as the tanking approval ratings and polling figures show. If people aren't encouraged to want things, then it's easier to manage the politics and to convince the electorate that they should be grateful for what Labour does deliver. But according to its timetable, and its moment of choosing.

The second goes to the heart of the relationship between bourgeois politics and capital. Rachel Reeves's fidelity to the household model of state finances is well known and well criticised, not least because it's a distortion of how government monies work. Yet a lot of criticism is couched in terms of "when will she realise/if only she realised the truth", the species of Milquetoast criticism that tried to explain away Tory attacks on the disabled because they're "out of touch". But like Iain Duncan Smith and his successors, Reeves knows exactly what she's doing. The household model and a government's acceptance of it is a short cut for saying they accept the parameters of the done thing. That is a politics that will do nothing to alter the fundamentals of the balance of class forces the Tories struck in the 1980s. By pretending the state is like a business with its incomings and outgoings, Reeves and friends are acting and thinking like managers making decisions about what gets spent on whom within the constraints of a balanced budget. Their choices are always "tough choices", but it hides the conflictual character of the social system they're overseeing by depoliticising much of what they do as a technocratic exercise. The class conscious sections of capital, despite its more excitable elements, know everything is tickety boo if this treatment of the state is core to a Labour government's politics. It also has the added bonus of sustaining a politics that allow the Tories to slide back into office when Labour has outlived its usefulness. For example, the Tories capitalised on the financial crisis of 15 years ago because Labour kept to their framing of politics and were unable to find a way of repelling their attacks from within this paradigm.

One doesn't have to think too hard about why Reeves is comfortable with dishonest politics. But its wide acceptance as the common sense of British politics, its illusio, is rigorously policed by internal party cultures and shenanigans, the media, think tanks, mainstream economics, and everyday interactions between politicians at all levels. Of course we can't afford to nationalise water, because that means cutting something else or putting up taxes. Taxing the wealthy more or conceiving alternative models of ownership are not allowed. They touch upon the fundaments of class relations. We can't have the well-heeled coughing up more for the system that enriches them, nor suggesting there might be different ways of doing things that doesn't require the dictatorship of private property. And this is why, even under extreme electoral pressure, this Labour government will not nationalise water. They'd rather toss an election than show capital that it doesn't have its best interests at heart, and we don't have too far to look back into recent history to see that is the case.

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