Stammering minister claims he hasn’t been influenced and water wasn’t discussed
Environment Secretary Steve Reed has suffered a ‘car-crash’ interview on Sky News, when challenged about accepting a £2,000 football freebie from a massive investment firm that owns Northumbrian Water. The water industry, privatised in the 1980s, is regulated by Ofwat, which takes direction from Reed’s department.
A reddening Reed first stammered through a reply claiming that he hadn’t been influenced, hadn’t known his hosts owned a massive water firm and water was never discussed – then claimed it was ‘not helpful’ that he was being asked about it on TV:
Reed then tried to absolve himself by pointing out measures he is ‘putting through Parliament now the toughest action’ on water company pollution.
Ofwat, under Reed, is allowing companies to increase water prices to customers by as much as eighty-four percent to pay for fixing the water infrastructure that is spewing faeces into the UK’s rivers and coastal waters after years of neglect under privatisation, when the obvious answer is that they should be fixing what they broke, at their own cost, either through borrowing or from the massive profits they have made and dividends they have paid to fat-cat investors for the past four decades.
Croydon MP Reed is a favourite of Labour leader Keir Starmer, let off – like other Labour right-wingers – even after making racist comments, his second such offence in the space of a couple of weeks, rather than sacked like left-wingers have been for innocuous and accurate comments. He is a long-time supporter of Israel and recently set the police on two Croydon pensioners after they took part in a peaceful demonstration against Israel’s genocide in Gaza – and who ignored requests from local Muslims last year to meet to discuss the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
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The absolute state of the divvy!!
The next water-borne parasite to be discovered ought to be named after reed.
Maybe the Starmer-bossman called his mates at SKY and begged them to run this story instead of letting the day’s news services hone-in on the FT’s disclosure that Starmer’s faux-Labour will not, NEVER, not at any time, EVER renationalise water.
Greed and avarice is easier for faux-Labour to deal with than economic illiteracy.
See today’s taxresearch org uk blog, where Richard Murphy and his wonderful readership salute faux-Labour’s GINORMOUS political and economic stupidity.
It just goes to show what a decent interviewer can do.
All too rare though.