Clive Lewis

I will make some progress. Let us recap, because I do not want to go on too long; I want to conclude, if I can. That money from Thames Water—that half a billion pounds in interest payments—will keep a rotten system afloat for just a little longer. The myth of privatisation is that the private sector will act in the long-term interests of the British public because it wants to turn a profit. That is preposterous, as is proven by the state of our water, and exhibit A is Thames Water. We can now turn to the question of where the investment will come from. Under public ownership, it will come from the only place it ever should have—from us, the public—and every penny of it will go back into the system. It will go into the pipes, the rivers, the seas we swim in and the water we drink. There will be a direct relationship between what we pay and what we get, with no offshore dividends, no bloated bonuses and no debt-laden shell games—just clean, accountable, democratic water. When I was in Afghanistan, every soldier had one critical duty: to stay hydrated. To dehydrate was considered a military offence, because it put the soldier and their team at risk. If someone ran out of water, we did not debate markets or metrics; we shared what we had. We had each other’s backs. As the desert-dwelling Fremen in James Herbert’s novel “Dune” believed: “A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe”. It is time our water returned to the tribe, to the people, to the public. We can do better; we must, and with this Bill, we will. I commend it to the House.