Lamestream media conflates Scotland with UK
Published in The Edinburgh Evening News, December 12th, 2024 and in The National, 11th December, 2024.
Over the weekend, the Guardian lazily reported the following:
Except it’s wrong to imply this problem exists in the whole of the dysfunctional and failing UK. Scottish Water, which supplies Scotland’s domestic market, is publicly owned, thanks to the 1994 Strathclyde Regional Council public water referendum. (Unfortunately, English Labour privatised Scotland’s commercial water before it was booted from office in 2007.)
By contrast, the nine debt-laden and polluting water companies in England are all privately owned. 71% of the shares are in the hands of overseas entities including hedge funds, foreign governments and businesses sheltering in tax havens.
The Guardian refers to the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), created in 1990 to provide independent reassurances that water supplies are safe, but it regulates England and Wales, not Scotland. The Drinking Water Quality Regulator (DWQR) monitors Scotland’s public drinking water quality and also advises ministers on future investment to maintain quality.
By all accounts, the English/Welsh DWI is pretty toothless. A quick internet search revealed:
In May, several people became ill in Beckenham, southeast London, where scientists suspect the water was most likely contaminated with cryptosporidium, Giardia or Salmonella. When residents complained, Thames Water refused to test more than one property because it claimed the results showed no reasons for concern.
In 2023, Thames Water dumped raw sewage into Chaffinch Brook in Beckenham 13 times in 25 hours.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, the company spewed sewage into London’s waterways for 12,105 hours and 37 minutes, 4 times more than the previous year.
Last spring, cryptosporidium was detected in the water supply in the Brixham area of Devon.
In 2023 Thames Water dumped sewage 13 times leading to more than 25 hours of discharge into the River Wandle in south Croydon and said it will continue sewage dumps into the river until 2035, claiming it doesn’t have the money to upgrade the infrastructure until then. Thames Water admitted that no work had been carried out on the Wandle since 2018.
Imagine the hysterical headlines had any of these incidents occurred in Scotland!
Scottish Water regularly tests water quality at its treatment works and at customers’ taps to ensure it meets required standards. It has a Water Hygiene Microbiology lab in Livingston, and state-of-the-art Process Support Laboratories in Edinburgh and Inverness.
Furthermore, Scotland’s water quality regulations are aligned with those of the EU. The Scottish Parliament passed The Public Water Supplies (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022 , that went into effect in January 2023. An extract from the law:
Earlier this year Scottish Water became the only water company in the UK and Europe to be awarded accreditation for a new method of detecting the Somatic Coliphages virus in water at its Edinburgh and Inverness labs.
It’s not a requirement to test for Somatic Coliphages, which, by the way, aren’t harmful to humans, but they can indicate the presence of other viruses that are.
I find it hard to believe that Scottish Water’s labs in Edinburgh and Inverness that can test for viruses can’t test and certify the chemicals needed to clean our drinking water. If for some reason they can’t do this, because 87% of Scotland’s waterways are clean vs just 14% in England, the likelihood of waterborne diseases sickening our population is much lower than in England.
Should there be an instance of a waterborne pathogen that makes Scots ill, you can be sure the unionist-controlled media up here will be screaming blue murder.
What the lame stream unionist media won’t do, however, is point out the elephant in the room - that the wholesale privatisation of the UK’s public assets has left the people on this little island immiserated and miserable.
Scotland, you know what you need to do.