Tory Led Coalition Helps Foreign Companies to Rip Us Off!

If Thames Water get their way and Ofwat agree as from 2014 millions of households will have an £29 surcharge added to their water bills. This will be on top of  any planned increases on water bills. A spokesman for Australia's Macquarie Group the company which owns Thames Water said:

 "We have had a tough time financially as a company because of increased costs"

Haven't most people had a hard time financially these past three years, why should we be forced to bail them out when they have made huge profits already at our expense?

The company give a number of reasons why they want this extra money from their customers and the company quotes the biggest reason is because they want £273 million extra to acquire land for the construction of the Thames Tideway Tunnel, (which is a major new sewer development) and also:

1. They want to purchase the land now before the cost of land in London rises still further.
2. The cost of operating private sewers transferred to Thames water by the Government in 2011.
3. To subsidise the company for other customers who fail to pay their water bills.

Water privatisation was undertaken by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in 1989, when she partly privatised the ten previously publicly owned Regional Water Authorities (RWAs) in England and Wales through the sales of publicly owned assets to foreign investors.

When the Australian owned Macquarie Group purchased Thames Water, it didn't just come up with a plan overnight to build the new Thames Tideway Tunnel, this would have been in the original purchase agreement and have been many years in the planning, so they should have costed for it, not suddenly force the consumer to pay  for their profit making ventures because the price of property and land in London has risen! 

It beggars belief that the company are applying for this £29 surcharge when Thames Water revenues in the last financial year rose to £1.8bn! Putting it in context still further, the Tory chancellor George Osborne at the Treasury has allowed Thames Water to avoid paying corporation tax! Meanwhile giving permission to Thames Water to increase their bills to consumers by an inflation busting 6.7 per cent!  

This isn't all Osborne has allowed this company to get away with either! 

Thames Water has been allowed to offset loans they took out outside of this country in order to purchase one of Britain's publicly owned companies against tax bills accrued inside this country! So not only does this foreign owned company, the Macquarie Group, pay no corporation tax, they also pay hardly any UK tax! 

On 1st October 2011, water and sewerage companies in England and Wales became responsible for private sewers which were previously the responsibility of property owners. This was meant to be a good thing, but all the company has done is pass on this cost to the consumer. For all their talk about helping the public to keep the cost of utilities down, once again we plainly see that this snidy Tory-led coalition government is firmly on the side of the multinational companies and is helping them while driving down our standard of living.

A breakdown of the £29 surcharge shows that £16 of it is accounted for by increases in bad debt - fuelled, of course, by the economic turndown. So it is not really for their so-called "super-sewer" the vast majority of this £29 is because the company wants all the gain and profit without taking any of the risks, they are passing on the risk to the customer forcing them to underwrite the companies bad debts!

Thames Water has recently paid their shareholders £1.4bn in bonuses and have also raised their customers water bills by £100 per year, this has allowed them to collect an extra £1.4bn - exactly the amount Thames Water have paid out to their shareholders in bonuses!

Water companies literally have people over a waterbutt and unlike gas and electric, customers cannot change their water supplier, so they are hostage to anything these foreign owned companies can get away with charging them and they seem to always get what they want as OfWat is toothless!

In 1988 Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government covered up the Camelford water pollution Incident because they feared that prosecution would "render the whole water industry unattractive to the City" and because Thatcher may have been unable to sell off our water industry to foreign investors.

Since Margaret Thatcher privatised and flogged off the country's water supplies, a 2001 study carried out by the Public Services International Research Unit revealed:

• Tariffs increased by 46% in real terms during the first nine years.
• Operating profits have more than doubled (plus 142%) in eight years.
• Investments were reduced
• Public health was been jeopardised through water cut-offs for non-payment (this was made illegal in 1998 by the Labour government along with repayment meters and 'trickle valves'.) 

Margaret Thatcher claimed that privatising water would produce greater efficiency and reduce prices, she was wrong. Thatcher and her Conservative government also claimed that privatising gas and electricity would produce greater efficiency and reduce prices - wrong again!

Conservative PM, John Major privatised the Railways claiming greater efficiency and reduced fares, totally wrong! In fact this Tory -led coalition government are currently allowing a rail fares hike of at least 4.1 per cent and on some lines the price hike could be as much as 9.1 per cent as other costs are factored in. There has not been greater efficiency, trains are packed, people cannot get seats, amid cancellations and delays.

• Food prices have risen by 6% and will rise a further 4%; 
• Rail fares will rise by at least 4.1%; 
• Despite making huge profits, gas and electricity companies prices rose by between 7% and 10.8% in 2012-13 and set to rise again in 2014. 
• Companies are blaming the Government's ne ECO energy efficiency scheme and as usual the privatised companies are passing on the costs to the consumer. So this is an indirect stealth tax imposed on us by the Tory-led government.

Companies like Thames water, Centrica, British Gas, Eon etc are milking the lifeblood out of us, they are draining every last penny from our pockets.

I wonder, does Thames Water also makes use of the government's 'Workfare' placements scheme? If they do this would also give them free labour and considerably reduce their payroll costs, so they win again, because not only are they not paying corporation tax, or UK tax on profits, their payrolls would be subsidised by the British taxpayer as slave labour workfare placements do not receive a wage from the company, they are just forced to work for £52 per week JSA!

Does Thames Water use zero hour contracts and short time contracts?

David Cameron, George Osborne and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg are stealthily privatising what Thatcher and Major couldn't do and they are aiding and abetting companies like Thames Water to make vast profits off of our backs and pay hardly anything into the British tax system.

Study closely the effects of privatisation on your standard of living and quality of life, because the Conservatives are now privatising the NHS, education and the police service. Ask yourselves, can you really afford  a Tory government?

With Tory privatisation whether it is in the utilities, the NHS, education or the police service, will result in poor quality service at increased costs. Do you really want our NHS to end up in foreign private health companies hands? Companies like this who have already been given NHS contracts by this government and private companies that are not legally bound to show us their accounts, despite being given billions of pounds of NHS contracts?

Foreign companies have already bought up our rail, gas, electricity and water companies and look how we are being forced to pay the price, and now this current crop of Tories aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats, are selling off the rest of our public services to foreign investors. They have already awarded UnitedHealth Europe contracts to take over your GP surgeries, how long do you think it will be before we are being charged for our healthcare? Already there are mutterings about how we should be charged to see our GPs! These private companies that the the Conservative government are bringing to buy and run our public services are not doing this for altruistic reasons, they are doing it to make a profit out of our NHS, education police service, prison service and probably fire service too etc etc and it is Cameron, Osborne and Clegg who are doing this, just like previous Conservative Governments under Thatcher and Major before them.

We are now almost at the situation where all our utilities and public services  are going to be owned and run by foreign Equity Groups.

This is what happens when we have a PR man for a prime minister running the country, he can talk the talk, but cannot walk the walk, he can flog everything off, but he has absolutely no idea of the consequences or the harm he is doing to this country for future generations and what is more he doesn't care.

The Conservatives promised us that our bills/fares etc would go down under their privatisation, they haven't they rocketed, we are paying more for our gas and electricity and water in this country so France, Germany and Russia etc can all enjoy cheaper bills at our expense!

As Osborne is poised with his foot on the pump and is furiously over inflating the housing and credit bubble, artificially bucking the market with taxpayers money and  using our money for Tory re election purposes, he is priming us all for another "Tory boom and bust" and when the bust comes as we all know it will, how will we sustain ourselves when this government have sold off every last piece of our industry and public services to foreign investors?

The Conservative party is not a proper political party, it is just the political wing of big business, banks and multinational companies, it is the  party of the City establishment. It is NOT for us ordinary folk, it is about making money and milking us for every last penny it can get out of us and giving us absolutely nothing in return. If that means taking benefits away from our poor, sick, disabled and vulnerable to achieve this, then so-be-it! If that means keeping people barely existing on low wages, forcing our unemployed to work full-time for about £65 per week and driving down the living standards of the "squeezed middle" too just to make these huge companies even richer and forcing people to use food banks and pushing children and whole families into poverty having to make a choice between heating their homes or eating, then that's OK too. If the Tories whole ideological agendas' success depends upon driving a wedge between friends and neighbours and turning the public against one another until everyone hates and loathes the very sight of  their neighbours, or even strangers as well as each other, then this is what the Conservatives will do. In fact they are already doing it! They are doing under our very noses, while PR man Dave lies to your face like a snake oil salesman!  This Tory government is turning this country into a cesspit of steaming hatred and resentment of each other. Sending vans into areas with high immigrant population telling them to "go home".  Such hideous situations can only end in tears - ours!

And never forget - the Tory led coalition government could NOT do any of this if they were not being enabled to do so by the Liberal Democrats!