Feeling ashamed listening to the UK Home Secretary. This is not who we are.

Our monthly electricity direct debit went from £70 to £251 in March. Our supplier, E.ON, announced they’d made £3.47 billion profit for the first 6 months of 2023. There’s something wrong with how we manage our utilities in the UK. Read more

Finally! This awful man has sucked up too much air time and newsprint.

YES! Boris Johnson resigns as an MP with immediate effect. Open a bottle of the good stuff. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live…

Who thought that swearing allegiance to the king is something we’d be told to do in 2023? I can’t believe how out of touch these people are.

Read more on i news…

If you live in the UK, you will have noticed the increased level of interest in the discharge of sewage into our rivers and seas. The government is concerned about the impact of this on the upcoming local elections and is talking tough but doing nothing.

The situation with raw sewage also affects businesses. For instance, we live in South Devon, where we are fortunate to have access to some of the best beaches in the UK. One of which, Blackpool Sands was voted the “best beach in Britain,” according to the blurb on the website:

Nature’s golden beach, set in an unspoilt, sheltered bay, lapped by clear blue water and surrounded by magnificent evergreens and pines. Blackpool Sands is the ideal family beach to relax, swim or sail. But don’t just take our word for it – come and see for yourself! Relax or play; it’s South Devon’s most beautiful beach any day!

The owners of Blackpool Sands have invested a lot of money over the winter in new and upgraded facilities. I can’t imagine how they feel learning that, according to the Independent newspaper, Blackpool Sands ranks the worst for seaside sewage spillage as shown in the following graphic.

Since privatisation in 1989, private water companies in England* have underinvested in pollution prevention to boost profits*.

They’ve built a debt mountain of £53bn, while giving shareholders £72bn!

Attempts to regulate them have failed. Under privatisation, it clearly pays to pollute.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The UK’s most trusted utility company is publicly owned Scottish Water. They’ve spent £72 more per household per year than English water companies. That’s equivalent to an extra £28 billion being invested in England’s water network!

Send the Government a clear message: stop privatisation, stop the sewage.

You can help by signing the petition organised by We Own It here

In case you’re still wondering who to vote for in this May’s local elections, here’s a list of Tory achievements during the last thirteen years:

• 1,000 sure start centres closed.
• 780 libraries closed.
• 700 football pitches closed.
• Food bank use is up 5,400%.
• Homelessness is up 1,000%.
• Rough sleeping up 1,200%
• Evictions at record highs.
• Student fees are up 300%.
• Student debt has risen 150%.
• Eradication of EMA (education maintenance allowance).
• National debt has risen from £850billion to £2.25trillion.
• GBP fell by around 15% versus EUR and USD.
• Manufacturing in recession.
• Construction in recession.
• Services close to recession.
• 25-30% cuts to all govt departments.
• 25,000 fewer police.
• 20,000 fewer prison officers.
• 10,000 fewer border officials.
• 10,000 fewer firefighters.
• 10,000 fewer medical professionals.
• 14,000 fewer bed spaces for mental illness.
• Creation of 1.3m jobs, mainly temporary, self-employed, gig economy and Zero Hours Contract.
• Only 30k full-time work positions were created.
• 25% cuts for our disabled community.
• 80% cuts to Mobility allowance.
• Closing Remploy.
• 40% of working households with practically no savings.
• 70% of households have less than 10k savings.
• 60% of households can only survive 2 months without a wage.
• Increase of 50% in hate crimes.
• Increase knife crime by 150% to 22,000 per year.
• Life expectancy down 3 years.
• Voted down a bill which would have forced landlords to make their rental properties fit for human habitation
• NHS satisfaction level at lowest recorded rate.
• Council home building down 90%.
• 200k social homes lost since 2010.
• Zero starter homes built, despite the Tory flagship programme.
• 36,000 fewer teachers.
• Six form funding cut by 25%.
• 33,000 nurses leave the NHS each year.
• 14 prisons closed down, and the land was sold to developers.
• 50% of all police stations closed.
• 300 + courts closed down, leading to a huge backlog.
• Millions to a shipping company with no ships
• Economy the worst in Europe
• Billions to Tory Donors for PPE that either didn’t work or never turned up.
• Brexit deal that has seen the economy drop even further and exports evaporate.
• Repeatedly broke laws they’d only just made and had parties whilst the rest sacrificed
• Largest tax increase for 70 years whilst the chancellor’s wife and rich people like her simply avoid it.
• Crashed the pound.
• Chancellor of the Exchequer on the fiddle and fined by HMRC
• Voted to allow water companies to dump raw sewage in our rivers and seas for the next 15 years.

It’s not all bad news, though. Although inflation is at a 40-year high, at least corporate profits are at 70-year record levels, so that’s good.

PS - here’s a tip for any grovelling Tory apologists. Save time and brain-ache by selecting one or more of the following responses:

Option 1 response “None of this is true”

Option 2 response “It’s all true, but it’s Labour’s fault”

Option 3 response “More leftie nonsense”

Option 4 response “Labour would have been worse”

This made me chuckle. Read the A-Z of Tory sleaze here

A Tory source tells the UK i newspaper: “The iceberg is getting closer and closer… and you’ve got Liz and Rishi doing a ridiculous leadership contest. We’ve got nothing, we’ve done nothing.”

UK government ministers were accused of a “dereliction of duty” today for not providing anyone for the media round this morning, leaving presenters to ask why no one from the government was prepared to face the public. This followed the energy regulator Ofgem announcing that the price cap will increase to £3,549 on 1st October.

In contrast, Lisa Nandy (Labour’s shadow chancellor) appeared on BBC Breakfast and called on the government to follow Labour’s lead and freeze energy bills. She said, “The fact that no Government minister is available to come on your programme today is just appalling. They are not here to give assurances, they are not here to set out what they are going to do. That is a dereliction of duty.”

Today, news outlets in the UK report that water companies have failed to monitor the amount of sewage discharged into the sea in popular resort towns.

This is a disgrace, and I’ve supported a petition calling on the Government to renationalise the water supply as the industry, in its current form, is no longer fit for purpose.

Sign the petition

One reason that energy prices in the UK have skyrocketed.

The EU price cap on gas is 43.99 Euros per mega watt hour. The UK is £263.79 per mega watt hour.

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/38545/2023/5b6fd97fae.png" width=“400” height=“400” border=“1” alt=“Graph showing relative energy price caps across Europe />

Enough Is Enough! There’s a growing pushback in the UK against the status quo.

We’re not in this together, we never have been.

Read more here

Great quote from the Daily Mirror Whitehall correspondent Mikey Smith on the campaign to keep Boris in No 10.

“Imagine there being an active campaign to get Boris Johnson to stay on as PM, and not one to bring Gordon Brown back. Not saying either is the answer, but one seems objectively less of a batshit idea than the other.”

Peppa Pig and prolonged pauses – it is, I think, time to start worrying about the prime minister.

At the end of this speech, in an interview with ITV, the interviewer, having watched the speech, and gauged the audience’s reaction, saw fit to pose the following question: “Is everything OK, prime minister?”

Read more on The Independent

Mark Barrow has spent thirty years filming underwater clips that document the state of Britain’s rivers and streams. In the last twenty years, he has seen the percentage of UK waterways classified as healthy drop from over 90% to less than 15%. Now, as water companies are effectively granted free licence to pump sewage directly into rivers, he says he has witnessed whole stretches of water completely devoid of life. View his report on YouTube