UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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There needs to be laws that state dividends and bonuses can only be paid when the company shows incontestable success. Under no circumstances should a company be borrowing and paying dividends at the same time and the fact that OFWAT never flagged this, they should all go to jail for colluding to defraud the government.
What? Companies absolutely should borrow and pay dividends at the same time, that totally normal corporate financing. However, companies must also be allowed to fail and cause losses to anyone foolish enough to finance them when they take too much risk.
By definition necessary services like water don't belong in the private sector since we can't allow them to fail. The mistake was not that the company was allowed to pay too many dividends (that's what companies are for). The mistake was that we entrusted this stuff to private enterprise in the first place.
This is the root of the issue. That whole privatization was a scam as well. It was abandoned in the mid eighties because public opinion was so negative and the Tories realised it would be a key election factor. Then, once they got back in, they went ahead with it anyway.
It's self serving and short termist in the worst way. We reap the consequences down the road but still bizarrely, and despite all evidence, the view that the private sector is somehow always better persists among some.