The previous Secretary for DEFRA (Steve Reed) saw passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act which allows the government to bring criminal charges against water company executives for persistent lawbreaking.
So to say, "uk gov does nothing" is simply not true. The Labour government has started doing things. However, it's starting from a place where the previous Conservative government functionally removed all legal requirements. In particular, Liz Truss in the same role issued instruction that water companies no longer need to monitor sewage outflows and can just self-report.
> 'allows' being the operative term here which means that the statement you attempt to contradict has not been contradicted.
That's a totally absurd statement in response to "the current government put a new law on the books to give themselves the power to prosecute."
> How many executives has the UK government sought to prosecute under this law?
As stated in my original reply: it came into force in February 2025. It's currently November 2025. It takes time to commit "multiple" offences, particularly given they need to be investigated and convicted. And no, dumping sewage twice doesn't automatically count under any legal regime.
In addition, DEFRA identified that Ofwat (the water regulator) is not fit for purpose in July 2025 and set out a proposal to abolish and replace it.
So yes, it does contradict your statement because the government is literally acting. What would you propose happen instead? That the government hold show trials and just start locking up water company staff and execs?
The water companies are too busy lobbying for price rises/manufacturing consent in the media (of which these stories are a part of. The water companies will again claim they are a victim of low bills meaning they can't invest which is what causes these events...)
It's all so insidious
UK gov will permit bills to rise and nothing will fundamentally change when it comes to water in the UK except how much we pay
UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
It's really quite sad. I just wish people would work together to compromise but it seems all over the world there's this intense tribal effect. I guess evolution is to blame, we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now and as individuals modern life is far too complicated to have enough attention span to worry about every little thing, especially when governments and corporations often purposefully make it very difficult.
"we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now"
Then maybe this is the problem? And the solution to build smaller societies again where the individual can have meaningful impact and not give up from the start to even try to move the buerocratic leviathan even a little bit in the right direction?
Which does sound nice, but then runs into the problems of neighbors who don't follow those same rules and who decided to eat your lunch, either economically through unrestrained capitalism seeking infinite growth over sustainability, or militarily to feed their internal economic pyramid scheme, or maybe just because assholes run their country and believe they are better and more deserving and decided might makes right.
There are significant efficiency gains to be had with increasing organizational and operational sizes, the problem is many people assume those gains will benefit everyone, at least partially, rather than the more common reality of all that efficiency being redirected towards the personal gains of a few. And billions of dollars are spent year after year to convince the common people that they will get screwed more if they don't allow it to happen because all the efficiency gains, that they have never actually experienced, will disappear.
Obviously all empires want to grow and devour the independent small states/societies and this is what happened and this is why only gigantic states(and those small ones siding with them) stand a chance today.
But a often tried out concept is that of federation. Meaning (semi) autonomous entieties get together for common benefits, like military defense and infrastructure. But of course also those have a tendency to turn into empires.
(The Delian League in ancient greece comes to mind, or well the russian federation today. )
But that does not mean it must be always like this. I believe there is a sweet spot that can be achieved and stays stable. But the current Zeitgeist seems to head in another direction.
The amount of damage done in the 15 years of successively worse leaders requires not only time to fix but also incredible political bravery.
That in the backdrop of a press who are actively working against the best interests of the country (they serve their often foreign billionaire owners).
I would give us a chance if we had an extremely charismatic and rational progressive in charge but we don't. Starmer is an admirable person but he doesn't have the charisma or the vision needed to get us out of this mess. Thirty years ago he would have been a "One Britain" Tory.
The UK progressives - the Lib Dems and the Greens - have absolutely no chance electorally and the media is pushing the far-right Russian-funded Reform Party as a "solution" and I'm worried that enough low-information voters will fall for it.
But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
- too many immigrants
- too many small boat arrivals
- the existence of billionaires
- too much tax
- too little tax
- UK membership in NATO
- UK being too weak in NATO
- too much smut online that kids can see
- too many attempts to control the web
Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.
The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).
This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.
> Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
Honestly I think all of them need to be fixed. You might think they are contradicting, but I think that is only a way to make people be angry at each other, and not starting to demand really fixing things.
Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.
They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.
It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously
It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.
I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option
> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP
In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?
(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)
Raising taxes is necessary because the previous governments have decimated the tax base. As of now, a median UK PAYE worker is paying about 13% on their income. A median German worker is paying about 30%.
This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.
PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
I mean arguably those are all distractions (except for the tax thing, indirectly); what really need to be fixed are the core, boring issues. The country, fundamentally, needs to keep the lights on; it needs to fix services which have been in decline for some time, it needs a credible route forward on pensions and other funding issues (but pensions are the scariest) and so forth.
A big part of the problem with the UK is exactly that; since 2015, the UK has been lurching from crisis to crisis, and more or less ignoring actually keeping the country running (keeping the country running is boring, Brexit is not boring, and so on).
I agree with you, but if you take an average person, chances are they will name one or the other as THE problem to be fixed.
The government is trying to focus on boring, annoying things and is getting rubbished for it. Doesn't bode well for other governments trying to do the same, does it
I agree with your assessment of the UK government, but I think you overstate the degree to which we are divided, aside from the hysterical rantings of the right wing press.
You are implying division among the public when in fact the division is sown by the billionaire/corporate media agendas, not real people:
- too many immigrants
- too many small boat arrivals
All parties and a majority of the public agree on these points (polling shows). The details of how to tackle small boats and relative importance differ, but I don't think anyone wants to see large numbers of people crossing Europe.
- the existence of billionaires
Most of "the left" don't care about billionaires existing, they worry they exert an outside influence on our politics and skew market fairness. There's common ground with many on the populist right here. The only people who don't want us to think about these issues are corporate shills.
- too much tax
- too little tax
This is a largely manufactured concern and reflects corporate interests or interests of the rich. The difference between Corbyn' 'wild' taxation plans and Johnson's was much smaller (as a portion of GDP) than that between the UK and France, German, any other northern euro country. Our debate around tax is hugely parochial, and concern largely used as a stick to beat the left with.
- UK membership in NATO
- UK being too weak in NATO
I'm not sure how many people are worried about UK being in NATO. Would love to see polling data showing this as anything other than a very fringe concern. In fact Ukraine and Russian threat has made defence spending much _less_ controversial than since the cold war.
- too much smut online that kids can see
- too many attempts to control the web
Polling shows the first is a majority concern, the latter not so much (this is a HN bubble). This is not a wedge issue.
The thing you missed is culture war bullshit (who is a 'real woman' etc)... but again, most people are either nonplussed or in the thrall of Russian chatbots and the MAGA trolls infecting uk online discourse. It's not something people really care about.
> UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
I really don't see any major western democracy being exempt from this.
Especially now that demographics have shifted and our populations get older it's hard to be elected unless you cater about what older folks care and don't care about. This makes long-term planning very difficult, as older folks couldn't care less with spend gargantuan money today so situation is improved decades from now.
Not really. The UK having a forum in the EU or not really doesn't change the size of the British society and the complexities of its governance. It only made a million small and medium and large things more complicated, for no benefit at all.
It will go down in history as one of the biggest debacles ever. The fact that the people who pushed for it like Farage are still listened to is bone chilling. He was wrong about everything before, why does anyone still believe him?
What? In a way to USA++ unbridled libertarianism, free if regulations and oversight, perhaps.
Praising _less_ ways to force the government, especially as heavily lobbied as the UK, into a positive direction is an astonishing stance.
Lest we forget who was famously the dirty man of Europe. And it's coming back, this time with unrestricted growing of the food on the industrial sludge (including a hearty dose of heavy metals and PFAS, of course).
Brexit was good to Putin and oligarchs of the UK. To no one else.
The UK has a clear path to overcome the failure of democracy when people vote along purely tribal lines; the King should retake power and rule benevolently for the good of the UK.
Drops the word "biobeads", refuses to elaborate on what that means. Such shit journalism.
They're small plastic beads uses to provide a large surface area for biological decomposition of waste in wastewater plants as water flows though big mesh tanks full of them. In doing so they become contaminated with various biological and chemical toxins.
Apparently that they float is important to the process. I guess so they don't need to dig them out with an excavator or some mechanism and can just float them out to be changed.
Well, I guess you could say that the government is doing something if a single member of parliament chooses to do some volunteer work on her free time.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/environmenta...
Obvs, uk gov does nothing