The fourth episode opens with a sentencing. It’s 2017, and in Aylesbury Crown Court a repeat offender is accused of a terrible crime. Showing little remorse, they are admonished for their behaviour by the judge: ‘Shocking!’ ‘Disgraceful!’ The victim of this disgraceful crime? That would be us.
In this episode, we warn listeners of a great theft of our country’s social, cultural, and natural commons, focusing on the privatisation of the UK’s fresh water, and its subsequent befouling in the name of a better profit margin. We explore the now-alien notion that nature is owned by all and trace it back to a near-forgotten document enshrined at the same time as the Magna Carta.
In doing so, we are first introduced to one of the West’s most influential and pervasive ideologies, to ‘the water we swim in’: Neoliberalism.
And ask…what would happen if we asked for compensation for what has been stolen from us?
Guy is a British Economist and Author, with an interest in labour economics and equality. He’s currently the is the professorial Research Associate (and former Professor of Development Studies) at SOAS University of London, as well as being a founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, an international non-governmental organisation that promotes basic income as a right, with networks in over 50 countries.
Guy has written and edited books on labour economics, unemployment, social protection policy, rentier capitalism and the need to revive the commons, the book which formed the basis for this episode: ‘The Plunder of the Commons’.
In which, he has written his solution to this problem, ‘The Charter of the Commons’. Which proposes a commons charter with, at its heart, a Commons Fund built up from levies on commercial exploitation of the commons that would be used to finance common dividends (a basic income) for all.
Gill is a long-standing and respected infrastructure journalist for the Financial Times. Her reporting covers topics ranging from: HS2, Care homes, Pollution and…of course, water ownership.
Her reporting was pivotal in uncovering the murky company structure of Thames Water and exposing the truth behind ongoing pollution of our rivers.
You can read some of her articles below
Plunder of the commons