This has created a void into which the “live money” of international finance has stepped, with Thames Water and many of our other public utilities leveraged to the hilt and substantially in private or foreign ownership.
A clinically minded focus on sweating the assets has replaced almost all sense of loyalty to country and civic duty.
Stripped down to the last lightbulb, it is no surprise that our utilities can no longer deliver the services the public expect.
So shamelessly reliant on the hot money of international finance has the economy become that nationalising Thames Water and other struggling water companies without compensation, so that they can walk away from their collective £60bn of debt, is in practice no longer an option.
To do so would risk cutting off the flow of international money on which so much else has come to depend. Myriad other projects would go up in smoke, with the UK deemed politically too high-risk to be a dependable investment destination.
It wasn’t always like this. Our pension funds could once have been relied on to provide the steady stream of evergreen funding that British business, and as they were privatised, the major utilities needed to invest in the future.
That they no longer do this is both unacceptable, and, on any objective analysis, bizarre, given the extraordinary quantity of the savings involved. It is therefore worth spelling out some of the reasons for how we got to where we are.
First came globalisation. This relegated our own stock market and economy to the position of just another minor player in a very large pond.
Pension funds began to spread their equity allocations around global stock markets as a whole, rather than just the UK, prompting a massive switch by UK pension funds away from UK equities into international markets.
