Secret Local Government Officer

Expert in tone, cynical & professional nuisance.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: "These water companies say they're putting £billions in."

Feargal Sharkey: "They’ve taken away £84 billion of our money in dividends and created £74 billion of debt…We've been cheated.”

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Douglas Barrowman made a fortune from selling tax avoidance schemes. When the schemes failed, his companies aggressively sold their clients another avoidance scheme which supposed rescued them from the first scheme.

It was all a scam. A disaster for the clients.

[That Civil Service tweet twice a day (fan account) @ThatCivilTweet]

Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Water Follies

35 years before privatisation 100 reservoirs built; no major English reservoir since.

Thames Water sold-off 25 reservoirs. Southern Water to decommission 43 of 93 by 2030.

Companies paid £85bn in dividends, borrowed £70bn. People fleeced.
https://t.co/mFiDoJnGWm

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Oh look, spot inspections reveal that 1 in 5 water company discharge permits are being breached.

Who'd have guessed.

Question is what are the @EnvAgency ever going to do about any it? Oh and how is that now three and a half year old "largest ever criminal investigation" into permit breaches going? Hmm?!

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Reed has ruled out nationalisation, saying it would cost up to £100bn".

Let me be very clear about this, any reference to a £100 billion cost to nationalise the water industry is a demonstratively, blatant, provable, untruth.

That figure relates to a report commission by 4 water companies @AnglianWater, @stwater, @SouthWestWater and @uugroupplc and referred to by @Dieter_Helm Fellow in Economics, New College, Oxford as "economically illiterate". @tomespiner

https://t.co/R6bv4Oplom

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Five more water companies in England appeal against Ofwat’s 36% average bill hike

They want more

People can't appeal, have to pay up, put up with sewage in rivers, exploitation normalized.

Corporations rule and no one is protecting people.
https://t.co/e9p5nR5bSI

[Secret Local Government Officer @secret_local]

Umm. Let me guess.... Nothing.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Hundreds of innocent postmasters were prosecuted for false accounting. It's a serious crime.

So what happens to a company's directors when they're caught forging, not one line, but whole of their accounts? And the High Court has said the accounts were forged?

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

40% of the world's dirty money laundered through London, UK Overseas Territories, Crown Dependencies.

Govt can issue Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWO). Since 2017, SEVEN UWOs issued. ZERO prosecutions/convictions.

Contrast it with attacks on little people.
https://t.co/K1IoMrhJly

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

The Ilchester Estate was fined £28,000 for over abstracting a local chalk stream by 35 cubic meters of water per day.

Collectively water companies over abstracted England's chalk streams by about 1,300,000 cubic meters per day.

And the @EnvAgency does what?

https://t.co/RtS2iyiOBM

[WikiLeaks @wikileaks]

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.

The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN.

Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at https://t.co/Zp7SvobICU. Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted.

IN has at least six captive subsidiaries under unrelated names including one based out of the Cayman Islands. Since 2008, when electronic records begin, more than 95% of IN's budget has been supplied by the US government (thread follows)

[Stella Assange @Stella_Assange]

Shocking update from independent journalist @richimedhurst—if you can, please help contribute to his gfm/paypal so he can replace the reporting equipment that Austrian agents have seized. #JournalismIsNotACrime

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

I’ve never voted Tory in my life and I thought the last Tory government was dreadful. But this bloke is the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime. He’s the diametric opposite of what Labour should stand for. In fact, he stands for absolute nothing apart from his own dishonesty.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Appears the French aren't happy with our sh*t washing up on their beaches.

"In the United Kingdom, this scandal that poisons the rivers. Privatised since Thatcher and the victim of under-investment, the sewer network is overflowing and waste water is flowing into the Channel and the North Sea."

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Thames Water tells the High Court that it's currently spending £15 million PER MONTH on lawyers and advisers and that next year interest payments on its steaming debt pile will be between £800 to £900 million.

Wanna guess who's money it is they're spending?

https://t.co/ASOJC8ls8v

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

High Court hearing today on Thames Water plan to borrow £3bn.

Already has £17bn debt, funded dividends, wants 53% price hike.

A third of customer bill covers interest payments. More debt= higher bills.

Let it go bankrupt. Nationalise at nominal price.
https://t.co/KnAXSNVpvv

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Oh deary me, they just can't bloody well help themselves can they.

@SouthernWater's under siege CEO has taken to gaslighting parliament. Now trying to make us all believe that the policy and regulatory change needed by water companies to allow them to fix all of this was brought about by campaigners and he thinks we're all terribly fabulous people and now wants to work with us...

Try it this way. The law was clear in 1991. It was updated in 1994. The court told you so in 2012 and yet again in 2021.

Here's a hint. We don't need or want your false, insincere flattery, try doing your bloody job, comply with the law and we need never speak each others names ever again.

Or perhaps you should have just done that in the first place, 35 years ago.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

I gave this TED talk warning Silicon Valley of the profound threat of it posed to democracy nearly 6 years ago. It provoked a lawsuit that caused me years of pain. The UK government did nothing to contain the threat. And here we are.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Q: How does a water company get a 4 star rating from the @EnvAgency?

A: Make sure at least half of your sewage dumping monitors aren't working or are offline.

Easy-peasy. Wouldn't that be right @stwater?

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Sewage released at 41 beaches in Cornwall after heavy rain."

Yep, you've read that right. Currently 41 beaches in Cornwall are carrying sewage pollution warnings. Now what bit of any of that rain at the weekend would qualify as "EXCEPTIONAL weather", or "EXCEPTIONAL circumstances"? Yep, that'll be none.

https://t.co/2ua8cudLUe