LAST weekend, in our local pub, we were talking about the state of our local rivers, the magical Wye, the Arrow, Usk and the Lugg.

Until recently these rivers had been some of the cleanest in the country but how quickly things change!

Today there is currently the largest-ever privately funded mass legal action against Welsh Water and Avara Foods which is turning a sharp focus on the degradation of our local river systems from the release of sewage and animal waste.

Fortunately, we have an excellent local champion in our Green MP, Ellie Chowns, who beat the local Tory Bill “bungalow” Wiggin (so nick-named because the elevator apparently doesn’t always quite go to the top) at the last election, with the latter demanding “a recount.”

But I digress, because what brought me up with a start was the revelation from one of our party that three of her friends had recently fallen sick after swimming in the Wye.

These kind of unpleasant and sometimes quite dangerous bouts of sickness are due to high levels of E coli and intestinal enterococci, spread by human and animal waste mainly from the large chicken farms that have grown up in the area, alongside discharges by Welsh Water. Environmental groups are continuing to monitor high bacteria counts that frequently exceed safe bathing limits.

I am old enough to remember when it was relatively safe to go swimming in our rivers and a time when the water industry was under public ownership.

Back then senior water industry managers usually had long experience in the industry and were paid modest Civil Service salaries. The water industry, much like the nationalised Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), was run in a brisk, efficient and orderly way. No-one was out to profit from it. The water was ours.

The privatisation of our water industry has been an unmitigated disaster which has only benefited the fat-cat bosses, the shareholders and the bevy of consultancy companies that live off the fat and help push our water bills ever higher.

As we were chatting in the pub, I looked up a couple of these water barons and discovered that Welsh Water’s CEO, Roch Cheroux, has a base salary of £460,000. With performance-based bonuses (“variable pay”) and long-term incentives, his total target remuneration can reach up to £1,081,000 per year.

And then there is the boss of Thames Water, the company that laughably still argues that “market solutions” will save it from imminent collapse. Here we discover that “Thames Water CEO Chris Weston receives a base salary of £850,000. With pension contributions and car allowances, his overall target remuneration reaches up to £2.3 million, though his total package varies depending on whether he claims eligible performance bonuses.”

Performance bonuses, I ask you! Not a single new reservoir has been built since privatisation and the industry has been starved of investment in order to pay grotesquely inflated salaries to the bosses and large payouts to the shareholders.

The industry remains a privatised monopoly and an absolute affront to the overwhelming majority of people in this country who want it nationalised with many of us urging this be done without compensation.

Of course Tony Blair and “New” Labour hated the idea of public ownership and for years operated under the mantra of “what works,” all at a time when most of us could see that the privatised utilities weren’t working at all.

And then we had Jeremy Corbyn and his very clear commitment that Labour would take back control of our utilities which unsurprisingly was very popular. So popular in fact that I heard Keir Starmer make that very same commitment in person at his local pub in Somers Town when he was standing for leader.

For the record, some of us from the Labour left had been invited to go and meet him in order for him to make these promises that he had absolutely no intention of keeping. More fool us.

Feargal Sharkey proven right

BY THE time you read this, we will know whether Andy Burnham has won the by election in Makerfield. Now while I do think that Andy can be a bit flaky, I also think that he is relatable and that his political journey in recent years has gone in an encouraging direction.

There are many reasons why I personally hope that he is elected to replace Keir Starmer ASAP, and one of them is that he has been listening carefully to the public, to the unions and to one of the great campaigners of our time, Feargal Sharkey, and is committed to bringing water and energy back under public control.

There is of course a difference between “control” and “ownership,” which he knows very well. But, for instance, so dire is the situation of the indebted by £20bn Thames Water, that the government may have absolutely no choice but to nationalise it in the coming weeks.

Indeed, this may be one of Burnham’s first acts should he become PM. He can do it of course by issuing government bonds to shareholders instead of cash, thus laying the old canard of it being “too expensive and costing £100bn,” or he could simply nationalise it without compensation.

And finally, last week, I visited a brook from my childhood that runs adjacent to an ancient mill and its mill-stream near Thame and is known locally as “the county boundary stream” as it forms the border between Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

I remember standing on an old bridge, catching small brown trout on a line, and them putting them back into what was then a fast-flowing chalk stream bedecked with long flowing strands of white flowering water crowfoot.

Thirty or so years on, the stream has widened considerably as further upstream the old mill stream has become blocked and is now in summer a dried-up bed of reeds as the water pours into the adjacent waterway. The boundary stream is dark, slimy, muddy and lifeless, the water crowfoot and the trout are no more. Presiding over this disgraceful loss of a chalk stream is the Environment Agency, which like Ofwat, is another useless, toothless, excuse machine.

Perhaps Feargal Sharkey should be put in charge of putting them both out of their misery!

This column appears fortnightly.