The Silent Tyranny: How Corporate Interests Have Hijacked Our Water and Our Future

I dedicate this piece first to Dominic, and the rest of world. Let me lay this out for you with the level of detail and urgency that this issue demands.

I've been closely monitoring the situation for the past three years, and what I’ve seen isn’t just a political stalemate—it’s a calculated, entrenched system that has ground to a halt on behalf of private interests. Civil servants and influential figures in Whitehall are essentially serving the corporations that own our water companies—think BlackRock, Vanguard, Lazard, Templeton, Legal & General, and a slew of foreign wealth funds. Behind the scenes, it's an intricate web of opaque investors, hiding their stakes in offshore structures, where tracing ownership is nearly impossible. These shadowy figures, deeply embedded in the corridors of power, spread their influence across government departments, ensuring that the corporate narrative is the one parroted by everyone in charge.

Let’s address the narrative itself—the convenient fiction that it would be "too expensive" for the government to take back control of the water companies. Utter nonsense! The government could establish GB Water tomorrow, seize control of assets, take over the infrastructure, and redirect payments from bill-payers to this new entity. They could freeze and commandeer these companies' UK bank accounts, preventing the continuation of their looting—because, let’s call it what it is: looting. Beyond the eye-watering dividends and exorbitant interest payments on loans set up to benefit shareholders, there are unregulated, ad hoc cash withdrawals from water company accounts—essentially dipping into the till, unchecked.

By eliminating these parasitic practices, GB Water would generate substantial revenues, especially without the obscene profiteering currently taking place. And with those revenues, the government could borrow money on the market at normal rates, not the inflated rates dictated by self-serving investors. There are several ways this transition could happen, but none of them will, because the establishment—from Labour to Conservative to Lib Dem—won’t rock the boat. The Lib Dems, in particular, are the worst offenders here, though people won’t realize this for another 20 years. They cloak themselves in progressive rhetoric, but their true allegiance is to these very same corporate interests. Mark my words: if not in the next election, then the one after that, the Lib Dems will have their turn in government, and by then the damage they facilitate will become glaringly obvious.

Make no mistake, we are witnessing the biological warfare of our time. Our rivers, seas, lakes, and natural waters are becoming toxic wastelands, breeding grounds for superbugs resistant to the most potent antibiotics. This is a direct consequence of unchecked pharmaceutical waste, among other pollutants, leaching into our water systems. We are on the verge of witnessing a public health catastrophe far worse than the Black Plague. Soon, all our natural water sources will be biologically dead.

Historically, armies would poison wells as a tactic of war—an attempt to weaken the population ahead of an invasion. What’s happening now, whether through greed, neglect, or malice, is no different. We are poisoning the well of life itself. And no one in power is doing anything to stop it because they are either complicit or profiting from it.

This is not just a fight over water—it’s a battle for our collective perception of power. When the state redefines tyranny in more palatable, modern terms, convincing the public it doesn’t exist, the populace is left blind to the very forces that are undermining their survival.

So, I stand by the term 'tyranny.' It may not look like the brutal regimes we’ve been conditioned to recognize, but in a modern sense, it’s very much that. This is an elite-driven, corporatized tyranny, one that values profit over the basic health and survival of its citizens. When a government is more accountable to corporations than its own people, we are living under a form of dictatorship, whether you choose to call it that or not.

Our only option is to reclaim these institutions, perhaps through citizens' assemblies or other grassroots movements. The political class is failing us, and the longer we sit idle, the more entrenched this disaster becomes. It’s time to recognize this for what it is—a fight for the survival of both the environment and humanity. If that’s not tyranny, then I don’t know what is.