London mayor 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 with the Seine and will turn the Thames, in ten years (trust me, long) into a river in which you can swim. A titan task, given that the water companies privatized by Margaret Thatcher have turned it into a veritable landfill, dumping hundreds of billions of wastewater since 2020.
It is one of the biggest – if not the biggest – pollution scandals in British history. Since wastewater from homes and businesses goes through the same pipes as that which 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 masks 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 carried out by the Thames Water company, which supplies 16 million people, have multiplied by five in the last four years and amount to a total of 72,000 million liters of wastewater.
Therefore, it is not surprising that a level of E.coli bacteria ten times higher than what is considered acceptable has been detected. The river banks are lined with do-not-swim warnings. A dip 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 (Labor has several times raised the possibility of making them state again, just like the electricity, gas and railways, when he comes to power).
In these thirty-five years they have borrowed 82,000 million euros and, instead of reinvesting in improving infrastructure, 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 North American multinational BlackRock.
After filling the Thames with the waste from 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 debt of 25 billion euros (its shareholders have refused to put up capital).
But knowing that the government cannot allow Londoners to be left without drinking water, it is asking for a bailout, or authorization to raise bills by 40%. In other words, their excesses will be paid for by their clients, or if not by all taxpayers.
Last year, 3.6 million hours of wastewater discharges into British rivers and seas were recorded (1,271 daily episodes), compared to 1.75 million in 2022, without there being any justification for having had more rain.
In theory there is a government body in charge of supervising the process to prevent abuses, but it does not investigate because, with the cuts, it lacks the necessary budget and personnel.
And companies, with good contacts in the Administration, roam freely. There is not a single English river that is not currently severely polluted by European Union standards, with the foreseeable impact on aquatic life.
London’s pipes were designed for a city of two million people, and now there are nine and a half. The problem is expected to be alleviated with the completion, scheduled for summer, of a super sewer (a tunnel of more than twenty kilometers) that will connect 34 drainage and overflow points, and divert wastewater to a treatment and purification center in the East End of the city, thus allowing the amount of discharges to be reduced.
Mayor Khan, if he wins, not only promises that it will be possible 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
