‘It would have been ideal not to have so much poo in the water,’ said Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins after losing the university boat race to Cambridge last Saturday. Thames Water blamed high groundwater levels after weeks of rain for sewage discharges that are a less unpleasant alternative than ‘letting it back up into people’s homes’. But no one’s listening to the excuses – for the failing utility, that is, not the dark-blue crew. Thames Water is the pariah of post-privatisation capitalism, facing a charge sheet of poor service and financial opportunism of which rising tides of river filth are merely pungent symbols.
The argument that water should never have been privatised at all simply does not hold water: the state would never have maintained necessary levels of infrastructure renewal. But let’s agree that it went wrong when most of the industry passed from public shareholders to foreign and private-equity owners: between 2006 and 2017, a consortium led by Macquarie of Australia extracted fat dividends from Thames, loaded it with debt and generally outwitted the regulator Ofwat. The current owners – including pension funds for municipal employees in Ontario and staff of UK universities, acting in their pensioners’ interest – are refusing to inject more funds unless Ofwat allows 40 per cent price rises and eases debt limits.
Almost certainly the company will now fall into administration and temporary nationalisation. Cue choruses of ‘I told you so’ – but it didn’t have to be this way if the regulator had stayed two steps ahead of the financial alchemists. Now, for utilities as for railways, it’s a matter of keeping private-sector capital engaged while undoing the errors of privatisation – and letting the floaters, as it were, drift downstream.
Crime and punishment
Compare these two sentences, as exam papers used to say. First, Sam Bankman-Fried, the 32-year-old American founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, who has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for a fraud that cost customers and investors $11 billion and for which, according to the New York judge, he uttered ‘never a word of remorse’. The jail term may look long but experts say he could be out in 18 and at least Bankman-Fried has a prospect of sunshine before he’s old – unlike other US fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi-scheme operator Allan Stanford, whose century-plus sentences ensured they would never be out at all.
Then there’s Tom Hayes, a 44-year-old British former trader for UBS and Citigroup, who was convicted in 2015 of rigging Libor rates and sentenced at Southwark crown court to 14 years, reduced on appeal to 11, of which he served half before being released in 2021. The original sentence was the harshest ever handed to a British white-collar criminal, the judge having decided to ‘send a signal’ to other traders tempted to cheat and perhaps to punish Hayes for gaming the justice system – first co-operating with the Serious Fraud Office, then switching to ‘not guilty’ when he came to court – to avoid extradition to the US to face similar charges.
The irony is that US prosecutors have given up chasing Hayes and other alleged Libor riggers, having had several cases overturned for lack of conclusive evidence. But the UK Court of Appeal, declining to follow the US lead, reconfirmed Hayes’s conviction last week. His last hope of clearing his name will be the Supreme Court.
What comparisons and conclusions can we draw? Bankman-Fried was an attention-seeker who committed a shameless fraud but, on the harsh scale of US justice, has got off relatively lightly. Hayes was an oddball trading-floor genius who many observers felt was made a scapegoat for widespread malpractice, but at least his jail nightmare is over. Both were operating in global markets that are fertile for complex dishonesty counted in billions but have no agreed cross-border yardsticks either for crime or appropriate punishment. Perhaps what’s needed is a financial arm of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Counting robots
In rural France, I’ve never seen so many shuttered businesses. I think with sadness of an elderly couple in my village. The wife ran the bar-tabac with petrol pumps until, in her eighties, she closed down. The husband was a mechanic who could fix anything; then he died and his workshop-scrapyard became a dystopian ruin. Cameos are not statistics, but sites like theirs rarely find new owners or purposes – and the landscape they leave makes the French economy feel even more moribund than our own, as both flatline into 2024.
But here’s a Le Figaro headline, ‘France reindustrialised in 2023’, reporting a net increase of 200 industrial plants across the country following a score of +176 in 2022 – the action concentrated in batteries, hydrogen power, recycling, bioscience and food processing. No comparable numbers pop up for the UK; but graphs show a near-40 per cent decline in UK manufacturing jobs since 1997 amid stories about how many of those are currently ‘at risk’ – with rare exceptions such as 400 recruits at Aston Martin.
Yet perhaps neither jobs nor factories offer the best measure of reindustrialisation, but robots – automation being key to productivity that leads to rising prosperity. France, I discover, has 180 robots per 10,000 employees against a world average of 151. That’s way below the robo-champs of South Korea at 1,012. But oh dear, the UK scores only 111 – and generates one-fifth less output per hour’s work than our cross-Channel neighbours. So France isn’t as sad as it looks; right now, the UK is sadder.
You’ll have gathered I had ample spare time to research this bold thesis, contradicting as it does the ‘broken France’ school of Telegraph comment. That was partly because I could find only one restaurant in the entire district open for dinner: Le Tournepique, a touristy offering beside the rain-swollen Dordogne at Castelnaud-la-Chapelle. Things can only get better, there and here, when summer comes.
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