Running Dry

By Mark Pritchard. Many Britons in central and south-eastern England will find their water taps running dry in the next few months. When that happens, they can blame Immigration and Privatisation.

Many parts of England, from Shropshire to the Wash and from Gloucestershire to Kent, are suffering from a desperate water shortage. Groundwater levels are now lower, in late winter, than they were at the worst of the long hot drought summer of 1976. Some major English rivers have run dry.

 On 20th  February, coinciding with a summit of interested parties, including officials, farmers and wildlife groups and the water companies chaired by Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, the Department for  Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) officially declared a drought across wide areas of England.

The immediate cause is a drastic decline in rainfall over recent years in the south-eastern half of the British Isles, whilst the north-west is seemingly getting wetter.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone not totally in the pocket of multinational Big Oil and Big Mining to deny the reality that our climate is changing – this is only one example.

Although the causes are as yet not fully understood and many of the solutions proposed by Establishment politicians are ill-thought out, motivated by anti-Western ideology, and in some cases liable to do more harm than good.

However, the reason this fall is precipitating a crisis in water supply in the most densely populated areas of our islands is a combination of  privatisation and immigration.

Privatisation has broken up the management of a national resource, water, which should be managed as a public good, into a mass of uncoordinated local water companies, mostly foreign-owned, exploiting our water for their profit.

Before this happened, Britain’s water was managed by a Water Resources Board. In 1973, this came up with a radical and far seeing plan to build a national distribution network for water.

Even now there is no nationwide shortage of rain. It is just falling in the wrong place, in the North and West, when it is mostly needed in the South and East.

The answer is a National Grid of pipelines to move water from where it falls to where it is needed. As the Chinese are now building on a huge scale. But China’s Government puts the Chinese people first, not the profits of foreign multinationals.

The response of successive Tory and Labour Governments to the Water Resources Board’s farsighted plan to ensure Britons had enough water was to scrap the Board, break up the management of national water supply into a mass of  regional water management bodies, and finally sell off our water supply piecemeal to foreign multinationals – privatisation.

The result, as  John Rodda, former director of hydrology and water resources with the World Meteorological Organization and now a UK-based consultant told the BBC, is that “Now, there is no attempt to consider the national resources in a holistic way. There is no national plan, and this is because the emphasis is always on each river basin providing resources that are used in that particular area.”

So privatisation means there will be less water provided for South-Eastern England.

Immigration, on the other hand, means there will be more water required. Already, one major factor in the current water crisis is not just that less water has been falling. It is that more water is being consumed. Because, thanks to Immigration, there are more people.

In 1976, the British population was 56,212,000. By then end of 2010 it has grown to 62,219,000.

An extra eight million people, equivalent to a city the size of Greater London. All of these extra people Immigrants or their descendents – the native population is falling – and most of them residing in the areas of our country hardest hit by declining rainfall – London, the South East and Central England.

This will get worse. The recent White Paper on this very water issue, Water For Life, warned the population of England will rise by just under 10 million by 2035, “with much of this increase likely to be concentrated in areas which are already some of the most water-stressed parts of the country.”

That and other demographic changes mean demand could rise by as much as 35% in the next 40 years. Whilst supply is, if anything, falling.

This is not sustainable. We cannot continue with more and more people whilst there is less and less water, and most of what there is falling in areas where the people aren’t and being wasted.

If we are to avoid a future of standpipes and ever tighter water rationing across the most populous areas of Britain, we must address the root causes of the crisis.

If the climate is changing, there is almost nothing we can do about it. We are just too small geographically and in terms of our effect on the planetary atmosphere for anything we do to make any difference to anyone but us.

Shutting down what remains of British industry, putting everyone on pushbikes and hideous wind turbines all over what remains of our once green and pleasant land will not stop climate change even if it were entirely driven by human emissions of CO2 – the truth is probably much more complicated.

But we can deal with the other two causes of our taps running dry. We can take back into the hands of the British people our water supply.

We cannot depend on foreign multinationals for so vital a necessity, and we need to be able to plan, control and distribute our water on a national basis, without profits for foreigners – or anyone – being squeezed out of what we spend on ensuring we have enough water.

We can also stop and reverse the endless inflow of settlers colonising our country, taking over our towns and cities, taking our homes and jobs and – as is now increasingly an issue – drinking our water.

Only Nationalists will do this. We have to get our act together so we can do it. Or, on top of an avalanche of other disasters, large parts of our country will simply dry up and blow away.