It’s no secret I was a strong advocate to Remain – see the contribution I made to the Green Register blog Brexit or Bremain – what it means for the construction industry – and events post the result have not changed my mind. In fact if anything they have made me think Brexiting will be far worse than I had imagined…
Anyway, so there I was in France, having to apologise for the frankly embarrassing position that the UK now found itself in, staying in various campsites and experiencing lots of different showers. Some high pressure, some not so high (though all mains fed). All flow regulated to some extent with a variety of different heads and spray patterns. Some with shower trays, some with tiled floors, some with shower trays where the water missed the shower tray altogether. Some with hooks to hang your clothes and towels on, some with shelves to balance a few things precariously on. Some with a division to protect your clothes from getting wet, some without. Most clean, but occasionally a rogue dirty one. Some with floors dried by the previous user with one of those giant squeegee mop things you often find in continental showers, some you still had to slosh about in the last person’s water. All operated by a push button with varying amounts of time that the water stayed on, with 30 seconds at any one push being the maximum. And, finally, never with a way to adjust the temperature but always hot…
Along with most showerers I do ‘thinking’ while in the shower although with my short showers, I have to continue my thinking time while towelling dry. While in France I was ignoring the perennial verruca and public showers concern and instead thinking about the ‘take back control’ mantra which seemed to have struck such a chord among Brexiters.
And since this is a shower blog with regard to their shower precisely what kind of control are they seriously thinking they will be taking back? Control of who owns the water that comes out of the shower? Well, if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland your national Government already owns the water, which means that so do you. In England and Wales the water industry was privatised in 1989. So citizens (I wish) of those two countries don’t own their water any more. Most people in Wales get their water from Welsh Water a ‘not-for-profit company’ which has been owned by Glas Cymru since 2001. This means there are no shareholders, and any financial surpluses are reinvested in the business for the benefit of its customers. On paper this sounds great, though as this interesting article shows it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. But in my opinion its better than England which has a water industry that is completely privatised and is owned by shareholders who reap the dividends every year from a captive market – huge monopolies in a warped and discredited capitalist system.
When I shower in London, Thames Water provides the water. What could be more British than that? A company named after the river that flows through the capital of the country. Only thing is Thames Water is not owned by millions of individual British investors but is actually owned by the Chinese people, the people of the UAE, (both via their Governments) assorted Europeans and Canadians and controlled by Australians. Other UK water companies are owned by Dutch, Hong Kong-based, Malaysian and French companies. And Northumbrian Water Group is owned by the Hong Kong-based billionaire Li Ka-Shing.
And the picture is pretty much the same if you look at who owns the fuel required to heat our showers. Two-thirds of the UK’s electricity is generated by overseas firms. Of the six major power suppliers three are completely foreign owned. EDF Energy is a subsidiary of the French Government-owned energy company EDF (Électricité de France) Group. EDF was founded in 1946 and became a public company in 2004. Over the years it has bought UK energy companies London Electricity, SWEB, Seeboard and British Energy. E.ON is a German-owned group formed from the merger of German companies VEBA and VIAG. The group bought UK energy company Powergen back in 2002 but it wasn’t until 2007 that its UK energy operations were renamed E.ON. Npower is a subsidiary of German energy company RWE Group. It was bought in 2002, having evolved out of National Power, later renamed npower, which had bought the likes of Calortex, Independent Energy and Midlands Electricity following privatisation. All these companies supply gas as well as electricity and Canadian and Chinese companies own large chunks of North Sea gas.
“Take back control”? Get real. The only way we would “take back control” of our water and energy supply is by renationalising them, and that, unfortunately, will not happen any time soon, Brexit or no Brexit…
And then I stepped out of one of those intermittent streams of water and just like in the infamous Dallas shower scene it had all been a bad dream. Bobby Ewing hadn’t been dead for the preceding three years… Brexit had never happened…
PS, if you want to know who actually owns Britain then read this.