Water firms exist to sustain life. They should answer to citizens, not shareholders | Will Hutton

An oversight system with teeth would stop utilities from inflicting misery by profiteeringThere is change in the air - vast change. Two years before the next general election it is obvious - just as it was in 1977 before Margaret Thatcher won in 1979 - that the existing policy framework has reached its sell-by date. Then it was the postwar settlement - including incomes policies and public ownership - whose weaknesses were becoming ever harder to defend, even among those of us who recognised its strengths. At the very least it needed a wholesale rethink and makeover, or, as Thatcher argued, be repudiated with a bracing new framework adopted in its place.So, in 2022 we have the prospect of 13% inflation or even higher, swingeing energy bills that will topple millions into destitution. Add in the failures of privatisation dramatised by excessive water leakages and raw sewage blighting many beaches and rivers, an impossibly overstretched NHS, and workers being badged as irresponsible for merely trying to resist dramatic cuts in their real incomes. All this has crystallised how the whole Thatcherite edifice of economic and social policy, decaying for years, is suddenly and obviously redundant. Continue reading...