The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has promised that, if he is re-elected on Thursday for a third term, he will imitate what his Parisian colleague Anne Hidalgo has done and make the Thames, ten years from now (disease long relative of death) a river in which one can swim. A titanic task, since the water companies privatized by Margaret Thatcher have turned it into a veritable landfill where they have dumped hundreds of billions of waste water since 2020.
It is one of the great pollution scandals – perhaps the biggest – in the history of the. Since wastewater from homes and businesses goes through the same pipes as what falls from the sky, utility companies are authorized by law to discharge it into rivers and the sea when it rains more than normal, in order to prevent traffic jams occur in private homes. But in recent years they have abused it to unsuspected limits, according to an investigation by The Guardian newspaper and environmental groups.
In London alone, the discharges into the Thames by the Thames Water company, which supplies 16 million people, have multiplied by five in the last four years and add up to a total of 72,000 million liters of waste water. Therefore, it is not surprising that a level of the E. coli bacteria ten times higher than what is considered acceptable has been detected. The banks of the river are full of warnings not to swim. A dive can not only cause diarrhea, fever, stomach and kidney problems, but even fatal sepsis.
And the same as Thames Water, the rest of the old public companies privatized by Thatcher in 1989, shortly before her fall (Labour has several times raised the possibility of making them state-owned again, like the electric, gas and the railways, when he comes to power). During these 35 years, they have asked for 82,000 million euros and, instead of reinvesting in infrastructure improvements, they have distributed 93,000 million in dividends to shareholders and bonuses to managers. Its owners are, among others, the Chinese State, the investment funds of Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, the Malaysian tycoon Francis Yeoh and the American multinational BlackRock.
After filling the Thames with the waste of millions of toilets, along with toilet paper and sanitary products, and turning it into one of the dirtiest rivers in the world, Thames Water is now on the verge of bankruptcy with a £25 billion debt of euros (the shareholders have refused to put up capital). But knowing that the Government cannot allow Londoners to run out of drinking water, it asks for a rescue, or authorization to raise bills by 40%. In other words, that their excesses are paid by customers or, if not, by all taxpayers.
Last year there were 3.6 million hours of sewage being discharged into Britain’s rivers and seas (1,271 episodes a day), compared to 1.75 million in 2022, with no justification for to have rained more In theory, there is a government body responsible for overseeing the process to prevent abuses, but it does not investigate them because, with the cuts, there is a lack of budget and the necessary staff. And the companies, with good contacts in the Administration, camp in their air. There is not a single English river that is not currently seriously polluted, according to European Union standards, with the foreseeable impact on aquatic life.
London’s pipes were designed for a city of two million inhabitants, and now there are nine and a half. The problem is expected to be alleviated with the opening, planned for the summer, of a supersewer (a tunnel of more than twenty kilometers) that will connect 34 drainage and overflow points and divert waste water to a central of treatment and purification in the East End of the city, which will reduce the amount of discharges.
Mayor Khan, if he wins, not only promises that you will be able to swim in the Thames, but that otters and beavers will return to the river as part of a €40 million investment project in nature protection. The damage to be repaired is enormous.
