I was a big bee (or maybe a normal sized bee but I felt big, maybe all bees do) gathering nectar from big yellow blobs with a human baby in each. I say gathering nectar, but I’m not entirely sure what I was doing, when I woke up it made me feel more like one of the big mechanical spiders tending to the pods in the Matrix. Woke up and suddenly felt really strange but it was very mundane in my bee head, didn’t feel like a nightmare. I can’t remember having another dream where I was not human/humanoid or a floating consciousness/3rd person, but an entirely different kind of being.

Had tons of technically weirder dreams (like the one where I was chased through the jungle by an unrelenting murderous bag of crisps that was so old and moldy that it became sentient and whose whole purpose was to kill me, before eventually getting saved by space faring people that brought me to a beautiful ivory cliffside city), but this one felt particularly weird as a departure from the usual and familiar insanity of my dreams.

Sorry I wasn’t very clear, thanks for pointing that out! I’m referring to the arguments opposing nationalisation in the mainstream discourse and not the actual obstacle to it happening (I wouldn’t accuse the Labour Party of acting in good faith).

Within the liberal ideology you often here things like “who’s gonna pay for it” or “it’ll be too expensive”, I’m saying that those arguments are surprisingly false even within the frame of liberalism. They pretend that it’s impossible due to some cold accounting reality in order to deflect conversation away from the core idea, but this opposition is actually ideological too (it’s just more of an uphill battle to defend keeping water in private hands than most other commodities).

As a matter of fact all neoliberal “theories” crumple under their own weight surprisingly fast (EU’s flavor in ordoliberalism with it’s 3% deficit to GDP and 60% debt to GDP ratios being dazzling examples of idiocy) so you might be onto something, perhaps it’s because they’re not the product of rigorous research but instead attempts to justify something that is already there 🤔

Is that really the case though?

Nationalisation would of course be supported by debt (just like any public investment), so it would only be a matter of comparing the interest rates to the cost of renting. Well most private companies are supported by debt (as they should), so part of the cost is directly paying for the companies’ debt. The state will always have lower interest rates (Since the BoE base rate shot up to 5% in the last 2 years you might have to take into account the maturity of different obligations but this would settle as debt gets refinanced), and taking the first company outlined, “Wessex Waters”, their financial report show a cost of debt of 5.2% for 22-23, with a debt-to-equity ratio of about 4 if my maths are good.

What this means is that for Wessex Waters, even if we completely ignored profit margin in the form of dividends (5.4% yield), overhead cost of private business (extremely high leadership salaries, bonus, lobbying…etc) and the fact that interest rates are only gonna rise, it would still be profitable in the very short term to nationalise the company.

Don’t be mistaken, what’s opposing nationalisation and public ownership is and always has been purely ideological (market is more efficient, national debt is somehow a problem), there is absolutely no financial argument against it.

BONUS: Because if I had to skim Wessex Waters strategic report, might aswell chop up some of the Chairman’s foreword:

The high quality of our customer service was again recognised, […] however, we were extremely disappointed that we failed to maintain our record on environmental performance.

Our financial health has always been, and remains, robust.

I thank the Lord Jesus for his constant grace and guidance and pray that we will be able to rise to the challenges we face.