• Wagner

I don’t speak a word of Russian but listening to Prigozhin’s inventive-laden diatribes – of which this is a pretty fair example – you don’t really need to. He claims the war in Ukraine would have been over in a week if he’d been in charge and even a few moments in his digital company makes you realise he means it. He and his Wagner army have now decamped to Belarus, seemingly having been bribed by Putin to leave Russia. I don’t want my medieval history degree to seem more relevant to present circumstances than it really is, but having a large private army turn against the state which has sanctioned it and then decamp to another one rarely ends well.

I think we can take it as read that Wagner is a scary bunch of serious hard asses. A good number of them were sprung from Russia’s prisons, which on their own makes them alarming. Then there’s Prigozhin himself. Most organisations take their character from the person at the top: ’nuff said.

Also, there are perhaps as many as 50,000 of them. If Wagner were a country, that would put it 62nd on the list of largest number of active military personnel, about level with Singapore and Cuba and slightly more than Belarus, its new hosts. God knows what fresh hell Prigozhin is going to stir up there. Ukraine is saying that this is the beginning of the end for Putin. Possibly: but all this shows that whoever replaces him may be no better.

Wars that go badly – and this one can surely be so described – have a habit of being very unforgiving to their originators, even if you have Vlad’s grip on official messaging. Increasingly desperate measures are demanded to try to make a bad situation better. Patriotism – famously defined by Samuel Johnson as being “the last refuge of a scoundrel” – is a good card to play: and both Prigozhin and Putin have played it. If you have them, nuclear weapons can also be casually mentioned.

Even more crazy plans might be tried. One possibility, a remote one I admit, is that the whole coup thing was a put-up job by Putin. “You think I’m bad?” he’s telling the world. “Take a look at this guy…”

Finally, you have the name of the organisation. “Wagner” was apparently the call-sign used by this group of mercenaries which was formed during the first Chechen war in the 1990s. Wikipedia says that “while the group is not ideologically driven, elements of Wagner are linked to neo-Nazism and far-right extremism.” If so, the name seems apposite. Richard Wagner was not a composer noted for his moderate political views. If the group had been called Mozart or Vivaldi people would have said, “ah, that’s nice.”

I doubt that Putin has had the time or inclination to ponder on the irony of the fact that he has been using an army with strong fascist sympathies and named after one of Hitler’s favourite composers to de-Nazify Ukraine.

• Water

• Moving closer to home, Thames Water seems to be on the brink of collapse. Its CEO Sarah Bentley departed unexpectedly this week and it’s been revealed that the country’s largest water company is having trouble servicing its £14bn debt and finding the additional promised investment to fix its creaking systems, which includes massive sewage discharges and the loss of about 250 Olympic swimming pools’-worth of water a day through its pipes. The Evening Standard reports that a Thames Water spokesperson said in May that “extraordinary energy costs” and “two severe weather events” had affected customer service and environmental performance. I think the problems go a bit deeper than that.

The Independent quotes Environment minister Rebecca Pow telling the Commons that “there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes with Thames Water to ensure that customers will not be impacted. And there is a process in place if necessary to move us to the next stage.” The last sentence seems ominous. Putin could have written it.

Opinions differ on whether privatising water was a good thing. This 2019 post from CIWEM provides several different points of view, some in favour and others not. This article from The Guardian in 2022 describes the change as “an organised rip-off.” Take your pick.

Opinions also differ about other privatisations. In my view, telecoms worked quite well whereas the railway has not. Certainly what prevailed in either of these sectors in the early 1980s was beyond awful and so something had to change. Privatisation makes a lot more sense when, as with telecoms, aviation, cars or electricity, you have a genuine choice. With trains and water you don’t and so a false market has to be created, stretching the ingenuity of management consultants and the patience of the market and of consumers. 

Thames Water ‘s outgoing CEO has trousered £1.6m in pay and compensation this year for presiding over a service that’s widely regarded, including by these Wiltshire schoolchildren last week, as woefully inadequate. inews quotes Thames Water chairman Ian Marchant as saying that “I want to thank Sarah for everything she has done since joining the company in 2020, building a first class executive team and leading the first phase of the turnaround of the company.” In the light of more recent news, which could not have been a surprise to Mr Marchant, it’s hard to know what to make of this remark. Not a great look, Ian. The market seems to feel the same.

The chaos at water HQ is not going to be good news for our rivers. TW has built up a lot of debt, not only to make investment but also to pay dividends. Despite having paid no external dividends for the last five years, through what the Financial Times calls “byzantine” financial arrangements, it was able to pay about £1.4bn in 2022. Thames Water needs to pay dividends to attract investors and at the moment it can’t be seen as a very attractive proposition. Water companies used to be seen as one the safest investments around – after all, they deal with pretty much the only thing we can’t do without – but no longer. The irony is that this comes at a time when we’re demanding even more of them.

There are three things needed for a utility organisation such as this to prosper. The first is having a fundamentally sound infrastructure network with all the assets accurately identified and promptly maintained. The second is having a clear plan of investment which is properly and transparently funded. The third is having a strong and effective regulatory system and clear relationships with organisations such as expert charities and local councils. At present, none of these apply.

• Boundaries

• The Boundary Commission has published its final report into how parliamentary constituencies will change from the next election in England and also the other parts of the UK. This is an independent exercise that must be ratified by, but cannot be debated or interfered with by, parliament. It reflects the fact that people move around and so constituency boundaries will, if let unchanged, become unrepresentative. The most general drift is probably from city centres to suburbs and rural areas.

Every area will have a change of some kind and you may hear some bleating from local or national politicians about how these are dividing communities or deliberately creating political advantage. Pay no heed to this drivel. The exercise is based on the recent government requirement that all constituencies should be +/- five per cent of the average size for that country (there are a few exceptions for island constituencies like the Isle of Wight and Anglesey/Ynys Môn). “Commissions must give primacy to the 5% rule but may also consider other factors,” the guidelines explain. “These are existing constituency boundaries, local ties, local government boundaries and special geographical considerations, such as size, shape and accessibility of a constituency.”

In our part of the world, there are two pairs of major changes. The Newbury constituency was previously largely co-extensive with West Berkshire but will now be carved into two: Newbury and the snappily-named Reading West and Mid-Berkshire. The border between them is along a line drawn roughly from Midgham to West Ilsley. In Wiltshire, the former Devizes constituency has retreated west and renamed as Melksham and Devizes, so leaving room for a newbie in the form of East Wiltshire, broadly centred on Marlborough. In the Vale of White Horse, the Wantage constituency doesn’t seem to have changed much, except that it will henceforth be known as Didcot and Wantage. Across the UK, England will get ten more seats at the expense of Wales (eight) and Scotland (two). Northern Ireland’s allocation won’t change.

It would seem that these changes might give a small amount of help to the Conservatives at the next election but, as mentioned above, it’s pointless to start looking for conspiracies in this. What does seem certain is that there will be a good deal of scrabbling about for deals, with sitting MPs, their party HQs and others deciding where their best interests lie under these new arrangements. Ultimately, we should be more equitably represented as a result. The quality of those who are in fact elected is, of course, another matter.

• Interference

• The Common’s Committee of Privileges has issued another scathing report, this time referring to a “co-ordinated campaign of interference” in the Committee’s work during the partygate enquiry. It doesn’t make very happy reading for the seven MPs and three peers (which include past and serving ministers and four people who were on Johnson’s now infamous resignation honours list) that it names. Several have them have refuted the allegations, claiming that their comments were an expression of freedom of speech.

The annexe to the report provides a number of specific examples of these attempts to belittle the enquiry. Some of the more colourful phrases are “a witch hunt”, “a kangaroo court”,  “a gross miscarriage of justice”, “malice and prejudice”, “a disgraceful and possibly unlawful conclusion,” “a political committee against Boris Johnson”, “biased” and “Kafkaesque.” Donald Trump probably wouldn’t have used the last term but he could easily have come up with all the other ones.

One of the conclusions suggests the Commons should confirm that “it considers that where the House has agreed to refer a matter relating to individual conduct to the Committee of Privileges, Members of this House should not impugn the integrity of that Committee or its members or attempt to lobby or intimidate those members or to encourage others to do so, since such behaviour undermines the proceedings of the House and is itself capable of being a contempt.” Once again, we wait to see what view the PM will take and how many members support the report. There would seem to be an important point of principle involved. If I had to choose between agreeing with the members of the committee or the people that it has recently named, I know where my vote would go.

• And finally

Asbestos, raw sewage, dangerous wiring and crumbling concrete are just some of the failings highlighted in a recent National Audit Office report. This is not, however, an investigation into dodgy building sites or non-league football grounds but a survey of Britain’s schools.

It claims that 700,000 pupils are currently being taught in buildings which suffer from at least one of these faults. As with the above-mentioned water companies, our infrastructure seems to be falling apart. What’s needed now are some of those amazing Victorian engineers and navvies. In the absence of a time machine, though, what’s needed is a programme of repair and renewal. The government would say that we can’t afford to do it. Increasingly, however, it could be argued that we can’t afford not to…

Across the area