Now the British Governments appears to be finally trying to address the absolute disaster that is Britain’s water industry, Nigel Farage is of course trying to get in on the act in yet another desperate attempt to say whatever it takes to make him popular.
He’s absolutely right that something needs to be done about the industry. It’s just that what he says he’s going to do once again appears to be based on pure fantasy vibes.
This week’s pull from the random sounds-good-if-you-don’t-think-it-through grab-bag of Farage policies is that he’s going to “nationalise half of the water industry“
Which half, how and why, of course, are questions that neither have, nor to his thinking, need answers.
Which is presumably why he had none in last weekend’s famous BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg. We previously learned from it that he knew nothing about his own councils or the environment. It turns out he also knows nothing about his own water policy – or nothing convincing at any rate.
Given the dire state of state finances, Kuenssberg fairly asks:
How much taxpayers’ money would you be prepared to spend to take half of the water industry into public control?
After he rambled on for a bit about how shareholders might just magically all decide to give him their stakes for free, she tried to get him to actually answer this very basic question:
…what I’m asking you is how much of our viewers’ money you would be prepared to spend on that? Because the credible estimate is it would be about £50 billion.
His answer?
Well, I think it’d be a lot less than that if you strike the right deal.
Uh oh. Just like his trans-Atlantic crush, Donald Trump. he obviously considers himself a detail-free deal maker.
“A lot less”. What does that mean? Kuenssberg asks him for the roughest of estimates:
So you don’t know how much it would be in any ballpark? £1 billion, £10 billion?
But no, no interview can fool Farage into even pretending he put any thought into his proclamations! His answer:
Of course not.
but apparently
…it doesn’t need to be a big sum of money if you incentivise private capital to come in and do the job properly.
Oh good. Not a “big sum of money” then. Kuenssberg points out that it is precisely private capital that runs it now. And, as we know, that’s been an absolute disaster. They created this disaster.
But private capital runs it at the moment and they haven’t invested enough.
Farage:
Of course. Listen, all sorts of people set up businesses and fail. There are more business failures than there are successes.
Well that’s reassuring!
In a last ditch attempt to get him to say something concrete, or at least try and show a smidgeon of justification for his words, she notes that he hasn’t always been such a fan of public ownership.
When Jeremy Corbyn talked about nationalising water, you used to say his economics were from la-la land. So why is your proposal not from la-la land?
His response of course in no way either addresses the question or explains why it doesn’t matter that his proposal is undoubtedly comes more from la-la land than anything Corbyn could dream up.
Look, we have Conservative and Labour governments who can’t even build a railway. So do we want government running these things? No.
I’m not sure what we learned from that exchange then except that Farage agrees that wants the water industry to be owned both by the state and by private capital, but also that neither the state or private capital are capable of running it. He agrees with what Kuenssberg claims but also disagrees with it. And whatever he does won’t cost much money because he will “make a deal”, contents unspecified – and/or anyway maybe those famously kind-hearted shareholders will just give everything to him for free.
Farage’s vibes-based policies are running amok once more. I’m sure all the economists that laughed in despair at his previous ludicrous economic proposals are guffawing again tongiht.
Here’s the video, courtesy of Spotted News UK.