GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL

Caroline Roddis is triggered by the United Utilities saga, and taken back to an unhappy part of her childhood, playing Monopoly

BEING a word nerd, I was always much more likely to reach for the Scrabble board than for Monopoly as a child. Monopoly seemed impossibly dull, a game where you circled the board for an eternity whilst learning which of your cousins was destined to become a heartless business tycoon and which was certain to be constantly bouncing in and out of jail. The word eternity isn’t entirely hyperbole, either—the longest game was apparently 70 days back to back, which sounds less like a game and more like some weird kind of suicide cult.

Fittingly for a game that’s essentially about encouraging greed, the idea for Monopoly was stolen from the woman who originally invented it in about 1903. Her name was Elizabeth Magie and she apparently came up with the game as a way to protest against the monopolists of her time—which is, I suppose, a bit more relaxing than standing outside someone’s offices on a freezing cold day. The game never took off, until a man called Charles Darrow stole it 30 years later and pitched it to Parker Brothers as his own. Capitalism, eh?

One of the bits of Monopoly that was particularly irksome—unless of course you’d managed to acquire them before anyone else—was landing on the utilities, because the rent you had to pay was a multiple of whatever dice roll had taken you there. It all felt a bit arbitrary, painful, and unfair.

And, as it turns out, the game was a pretty good primer for real life. United Utilities, a company name which I suspect we’ve all grown to know quite well over the past couple of weeks, certainly seem to have taken a leaf out of the Monopoly playbook: acquire the land, then screw over anyone who ever interacts with it.

According to the Telegraph: “Grouse shooting has been effectively banned on land owned by a water company under fire over pollution. United Utilities, the biggest corporate landowner in England, announced that it would not be renewing licences for shoots ‘to ensure the best possible outcomes for water quality’. Its land covers huge swathes of the Forest of Bowland, the Goyt Valley, Longdendale Valley, and the West Pennines.”

Grouse ban

The piece was, amusingly, referred to as an ‘appallingly unbalanced pro-grouse shooting article’ by the Raptor Persecution blog, which has seemingly forgotten all those times it praised articles which were wildly biased in their favour.

Despite it winning points for winding up antis, the article is frustrating in that, though it does quote ‘a spokesman’ for United Utilities, it completely fails to answer the question posed by half the people in the comments: how exactly does banning grouse shooting ensure the best possible outcomes for water quality?

United Utilities services an area that covers more than seven million people, or approximately one tenth of the UK population. Those people have no choice in their water provider (there’s that M word again…) but their provider is a publicly traded company and they have a right to an opinion on its activities. It’s hard to formulate any kind of worthwhile opinion, however, without the facts. And in this case the journalist hasn’t done a very good job of attempting to provide them.

What the article does do, however, is make a reasonable job of shining a light on United Utilities’ ap- palling pollution record, and the fact that they’re the worst company in the UK for it:

“[The Environment Agency report] showed that they owned half of the country’s 20 pipes that spilled the most sewage, and had pumped waste into the River Ellen, near the Lake District, for nearly 7,000 hours. Last month, a ban on bathing along 14 miles of coast around Blackpool was put in place put forward by the Countryside Alliance, that the grouse shooting ban isn’t to improve water quality but to distract from the fact that United Utilities are quite literally covering their local area in shit, is that water pollution is better than it used to be, so United Utilities don’t deserve to be so heavily criticised. because United Utilities, which supplies more than 3,000,000 homes and 200,000 businesses across the north west of England, was releasing sewage into the sea.”

Never dump on your own porch

These figures don’t exactly make it seem like United Utilities are competent at management, and the prospect of them applying the same level of ‘expertise’ to conserving grouse moors is terrifying. What’s really interesting, however, is the way this argument is playing out on social media. The standard counter

There is some truth to this. Before the 1989 Water Act, Britain was widely proclaimed to be the dirty man of Europe, with unusable beaches, polluted rivers and poor-quality drinking water. The solution introduced by the Tories was privatisation, which has so far—according to an article in the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management magazine—resulted in £160 billion of investment and improvements in water quality across the country. However, to quote Labour MP John McDonnell: “When the water companies were sold off, the government took on their historic debts. Since, they have accumulated over £45bn of debt that is ultimately the responsibility of billpayers or governments.” Which makes the £7.6 million the government got for selling off the companies look pretty paltry. There’s also the fact that, unlike a government with many demands on its purse, a water company has profits that it could choose to reinvest in infrastructure and bring the rate of pollution incidents down to zero. But that would probably involve also choosing not to do things like pay the United Utilities CEO £900,000 a year. (If the Countryside Alliance chief Tim Bonner was paid that much, he’d be labelled as a rich toff in the comments section, but funnily enough the United Utilities CEO doesn’t get that treatment—although the CEO is a woman, so (very much not funnily) she gets misogynistic comments instead.

Ultimately, we are more than 30 years past the Water Act and those decades have brought advancements in both technology and understanding, so forgiving United Utilities for their sins just seems too great an ask. As does asking us to believe that water quality will improve—and that the conservation benefits associated with grouse moor management won’t decline—if shoots are banned on their land, without providing any kind of evidence for such. No matter if the company’s ultimate aim is to distract from their failures or to win the battle for public opinion, their approach so far seems pretty, well, shitty. GTN GTN