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In our modern highly administrated, technologically advanced, urbanised society, water - the most essential need of life - is no longer freely available. One is no longer allowed to sink a well in one's garden. One is no longer permitted to drive a bore hole down to the water table beneath one's home and erect a wind pump to bring it to the surface like the old homesteaders used to do. Even the rain is now unfit to drink. It is far too acidic and full of all manner of toxic impurities which it dissolves on its way down through our polluted atmosphere.
The only source of water available to the individual in a modern First World society is the pressurised pipe connected to his home. This supplies him with good purified water. It is a great technological advance from the dubious facilities of previous centuries. But at a fearsome price.
The word price implies an amount of money per unit measure, such as pence per litre. But water is not supplied by measure. One is charged an arbitrary amount of money simply for the fact that the water supply is connected to one's home. What the house owner pays is therefore not the price of a good or service supplied. It is, by its very form and nature, a tax. Furthermore, it is a tax which is totally unrelated to:
Like house tax it is computed from the rateable value of one's house. However, unlike house tax, there is absolutely no concession to the poor and unemployed. Everybody, no matter what his circumstances, is required to pay the full amount on time every time. If he does not then:
Water companies are the only commercial (and hence unelected) entities who have, in effect, the power to levy a tax on every household in the country. Their prime allegiance is to the financial interests of their shareholders, not to the general public on whom they are empowered to levy the water rates.
My water rates for 1999 were £304.30. At the moment it is a painful, though bearable, expense. However, when my children leave home (which inevitably they will), and my wife has to go into hospital, which she does from time to time, I shall receive from the DSS a total welfare payment of less than £40 per week (1999 value). That is what 'the law says I need to live on' (and seek work) if I were living on my own. That is £2080 a year. Water - my most essential need of life - would then cost 14.6% of my entire income.
If I lived in some parts of the West Country, they could easily be double this amount. I would have to give almost 30% of my entire income in order to get water - and in a country with a maritime climate with one of the highest and most consistent rainfalls in the world. This is real. The fact that the water tax algorithm permits it as a possibility is inexcusable.
Water metering is on the horizon, but this does not excuse the past. That anybody should be forced to pay for water at all - ever - is to my mind a crime. It should be made available to all as a fundamental and ancient human right. Capitalism is what concentrates populations into tight masses in order to supply its factories and offices with human resources. This is why people can no longer get their water from natural sources at practically zero cost. It is therefore incumbent upon the capitalist to pay for the solution to the problem he has created. It is he who should pay for the purification and piping of water to his human resources just as he does to his industrial plant.
There is no amnesty for people trapped in such hardship. Only help in budgeting and spreading payments, which does not solve or even ease the problem at all. Let us be thankful that the lap-dog governments of capitalism do not yet have a practicable means of measuring and taxing the air we breathe.