The header pic is a screenshot from Southern Water’s latest self-promoting newsletter, passed to me in the week they managed to leave 31,000 households in Hastings with no water coming out of their taps, in some cases for five days straight.

Southern’s incident updates made much of the fact that they set up three ‘water stations’ around the town, and the bottles of water they were handing out had ‘courtesy water’ written on the labels. After a few days, they also stated that ‘local businesses’ would be compensated in a ‘fair and proportionate way’ after everything’s been sorted out.

It didn’t say anything about the rest of us. What happened to the rest of us…?

Let’s get this bit over with first: if you’re not very well, or if you are dealing with a colostomy bag, you can’t flush a toilet clear by pouring water into it from a bottle. If you’re able bodied, and have plenty of bottles, you can pour two or three bottlefuls into a bucket and sloosh that into the toilet. It won’t clear it completely, but it helps.

If you’re not able-bodied, or don’t have two or three bottles to spare – well, Southern Water did precisely nothing for you. Some old folks have found that they can’t get the tops off those bottles themselves anyway. One commenter, who lives in a block of flats for older people, compared the result after a couple of days of no water in the taps to pop festival toilets – and even after the water came back through the taps, there was no hot water for cleaning up until the supply settled in and boilers could be primed.

Other jolly consequences of Southern Water’s failure to keep the taps running, or to move fast enough or far enough to supply everyone with alternatives included:

No notice that our water was going off so no chance to fill kettle and pot, despite the fact we have now discovered that Southern Water have known for years that that infamous pipe was well past its use-by date, and that people living in the Beauport area had been commenting on water pooling in a new way in those woods. (It’s just one of those things that happens, opined our Tory MP).

A 24 hour wait for the “vulnerable person households delivery”.

No way to wash work and school clothes.

Long trips to ASDA or Sea Road, followed by long queues to get water, along with (for those lucky enough to have a well-regulated metabolism) “family trips to ASDA to do number 2s!”

Having to go to work/school/college unwashed.

Severe limitation on what we could cook, and severe difficulty with more than the most basic washing up.

No hot water means no heating either, if you have a combi boiler.

Apparently, the reason “back up systems” took so long to kick in was that we had to wait for the reservoirs to be filled. Surely, the whole point of a back up system is that it has to be there, ready for use in an emergency.

Opinions varied on how long we’d have to run the water that coughed its way back into the taps – but now we’re all forced to use water meters, that’s us paying for the non-potable water we had to wash away.

In the last few years, Southern Water have made our beaches dirty and our sea unsafe to swim in. They have failed to maintain infrastructure which has contributed to our town flooding twice in less than a year with the knock-on effect on local businesses being wrecked due to lost tourism income, and insurance premiums rising until small local businesses can’t afford to continue.

Now, after all the money we’ve paid in water bills over the years lining the pockets of shareholders, they’ll be wanting to charge us more to do the work we already paid them to do – that is, the maintenance work they should have been doing over the decades, and which we had been paying them to do – and if they say they can’t afford it, then they’ll get bailed out by the tax payers.

That is the joy of living with privatization, and that is why there is a boycott campaign going on…

Rescuing public services

That is why, during the Corbyn years in the Labour Party, we campaigned to take essential services like water, electricity and the Post Office back into public ownership. Most of us (including Jeremy Corbyn) never were “hard left”. We didn’t want to nationalize everything from your local grocers to your granny’s cake stall, and run them from some huge, inhumane ministry. We just wanted to protect essential services from corporate scams and neglect.

The COVID years demonstrated to us just how ruthlessly Tory privateers will bleed any “services” they get their hands on and, since the Labour Party has passed into Starmer’s control, his shadow cabinet have demonstrated that they have much the same ambitions. The former Labour pledges for our public services are now reduced to Wes Streeting’s and Rachel Reeves’ public-but-with-contractors outsourcing schemes — precisely the system by which the Tories’ friends and relations took such shameless advantage of the NHS though PPE and virus-testing contracts.

Again, we have already seen how the dread combination of government interference and outsourcing have affected our railways, during the RMT’s long battle to keep the guard on the train and win decent wages for train cleaners employed  at under ten pounds an hour by high-profit contractors to rail companies.

So now, we must not only campaign to bring our essential services back into public ownership (most people already know that’s what we need) we must also scrutinize every offer of reform to make sure it’s not the latest politicians’ attempt to disguise profiteering as a public service. At the next election, please make sure we settle for nothing less than full public ownership of our services, and a genuine NHS reinstatement bill.

Meanwhile, back in Hastings…

Now it’s apparently all over, there are still a few households in town with no water, and leaks are springing up in the roads where the creaking old pipes gave up the ghost under the pressure of re-priming the system. Last night where I live, late evening looked like an Ealing comedy, with white vans and people with huge trolleys dashing about parking water bottles outside doors whilst a tanker pumped water into the system in Queens Road, and a bit up the hill, water gushed out of a crack in the road and ran down South Terrace.

Someone has just left two packs of bottled water on my front steps. I wonder what’s going to happen next.

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