Listen to a grieving mother and have no doubts: water privatisation has been a lethal scandal | Clive Lewis

In more than a decade as an MP, I have attended hundreds of meetings in Parliament. Most succeed. Some linger. Few stay with you. But a recent event was very different.

We welcomed the actors, the real-life people they play and the production team behind Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business. It tells the story of activists and families who spent years fighting not only against privatized water companies, but also against a system that was supposed to protect them – and which too often failed.

At its center is a mother, Julie Maughan, whose story is one of the most difficult in the series. A few years ago, her eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, died after being exposed to polluted water. It’s the kind of thing that you read from a distance and have difficulty understanding. We record it and move on.

But there is no distance when you are sitting a few meters from Julie in a quiet committee room that suddenly seems very small. Or when you hear him sobbing while the room watches the TV clip of his daughter dying; her voice cracks as she speaks of the impact this unspeakable tragedy has had on her and her family. It’s something I won’t forget.

There was no performance, no demagoguery, no acting in front of the public. Just grief, dignity and a quiet determination to ensure no other family experiences what they did. At the end of the meeting, she came to thank me for the work we have done to bring water back to public property. This moment crossed everything. Because statistics can be disputed. Stories like this cannot.

And so, in that moment, it was no longer about politics or process. It became something simpler: what kind of country allows this to happen? And what kind of country decides it won’t allow this to happen again? These two questions define the scale of what this Labor government faces – and the standard by which a skeptical and exhausted electorate will judge it. People who have seen a political system promise and fail, promise and fail, until the promise itself becomes an insult.

That’s why I introduced my private member’s bill on water ownership and why I stuck with it. Because the water industry does not just denounce a series of failures within a sector. This exposes something much larger and much more damaging: the logic of a system that has had its day. A system that has taken our water, our housing, our energy grids, our retirement homes, our child care – things people cannot do without – and handed them to those whose obligation was never to us. This was making profit out of necessity. It has made the most vulnerable corners of our lives the most lucrative. It called it “efficiency” and told us the alternative was unthinkable. But it was never unthinkable. It was just embarrassing – for those who amass vast fortunes at our collective expense.

For more than three decades, our water industry has operated under a model that allows private companies to profit from a basic necessity while the public bears the risks. Bills are increasing. Investment is insufficient. Pollution is becoming commonplace. Regulators are co-opted into collusion. This is what activists have called the “privatization premium”: the additional cost that households pay not to run the service, but to maintain a system built around debt and shareholder returns. A transfer of wealth from public to private, designed into the system itself.

Water is simply the clearest example. And that’s why it’s important. Because if we can’t get something as basic as water, what does that say about the rest of our economy?

We have lived through austerity, the disruption of Brexit, the shock of Covid. And today, as the conflict in Iran drives a new surge in energy prices across the global economy, millions of households face a new wave of pressure on their living standards – pressure that will not be abstract. This will appear in invoices. In services that no longer work. In a growing and justified fury that the system is not on their side.

This is the moment that should focus all progressive minds in government and beyond. Because what is coming is not just an economic shock. It’s a political test. Center-left ruling parties around the world are about to discover whether the economic framework they inherited – the one written 40 years ago, the one that called for privatizing, deregulating and handing over the essentials of life to the market – still has a way to go. The honest answer is no.

The coming surge of energy will not be absorbed quietly. This will be accompanied by increasing ecosystem collapse and deeper droughts, which will lower the living standards of millions of people who have already absorbed too much.

The question for Labor is whether it responds by sticking to the visibly broken rules – managing the crisis, cushioning the edges, hoping it passes – or whether it takes this moment to present a completely different argument. Telling the public, and if necessary the bond markets, that a fundamental reorientation of the economy is not imprudent. It’s pretty essential. That an economic system subjected to this degree of tension can no longer afford the luxury of raising prices on the essential products of life. Extracting shareholder returns from water, energy, healthcare and housing is not a quirk worth regulating. This is a structural problem that requires a structural response.

Because these are not luxuries. These are foundations. Water. Food. Energy. Transportation. Accommodation. Care. Education. Universal. Responsible. Democratic.

And if we ask more of people – as we will have to do, including through taxation – we must be able to say with confidence that these foundations are run in the public interest. Not as an aspiration: as a fact.

The pressures people feel are not abstract, nor are the policies they bring about. The feeling that decisions are being made elsewhere, by someone else, in someone else’s interests – this is the space in which Reform UK thrives. The answer cannot be to imitate this policy. You have to offer something truly different.

Campaigners have been warning for years that the damage to our rivers and ecosystems is far greater than a series of regulatory failures. It’s not just about pollution. It’s the slow degradation of natural systems that underpins everything – and when those systems fail, it’s not felt in the same way. Some pay with inconveniences, but others pay a much higher price.

Julie Maughan, the grieving mother whose pain and strength moved us all so much, knows this better than anyone. She shouldn’t have become an activist. She shouldn’t have had to fight for answers. She shouldn’t have suffered this loss. If his story tells us anything, it is this: it is not simply a political failure. It’s a moral question. And it’s time we act on it.

Labor must decide. Is it on the side of the electorate or on the side of the water companies? Water companies do not have voting rights. I know where my loyalties lie.