Flood risks in delta cities are increasing, study finds

University of East Anglia

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New research shows how the combination of extreme climate events, sea-level rise and land subsidence could create larger and deeper floods in coastal cities in future. 
 
The study focused on Shanghai, in China, which is threatened with flooding by large and strong typhoons, or tropical storms, producing storm surge and waves. 
 
When these events coincide with other causes of flooding, such as high water flows in the Yangtze River, they can combine to create even more catastrophic floods, as happened with Typhoon Winnie in 1997. 
 
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA), Shanghai Normal University and the University of Southampton, together with other institutions in China, the United States and the Netherlands. 
 
It assessed all the causes of flooding in Shanghai and found that if considering climate, sea-level rise and land subsidence, by 2100 the floods of Shanghai could expand in size by up to 80 per cent and be much deeper. 
 
The authors say that to avoid disaster a major adaptation effort is required, which will almost certainly include raising defences and constructing mobile flood barriers, like those seen at the Thames Barrier in London. 
 
However, they warn there is also the risk of “catastrophic failure” of defences due to rising water levels, especially due to the combination of subsidence, sea-level rise and higher surges during typhoons, as occurred in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 
 
They say this danger is not fully appreciated and must be considered in adaptation in Shanghai and other deltaic cities, with a layered rather than single line of defence needed. 
 
The study, published today in the journal One Earth, is the first comprehensive analysis of flooding in a delta city. 
 
“These findings have wider implications for all coastal cities and especially those built on deltas like Shanghai,” said lead UK author Prof Robert Nicholls, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA and University of Southampton. “Such analyses are critical to anticipate and support the significant adaptation needs in these cities.” 
 
Low-lying deltas host some of the world’s fastest-growing cities and vital economic centres, but they are increasingly vulnerable to flooding from tropical and extratropical cyclones. 
 
Floods are driven by combinations of tide, storm surge, wave, river flows and rain. The most extreme floods occur due to the simultaneous combination of different sources of flood, such as a high river flow and a storm at the same time. 
 
“The likelihood and magnitude of floods are often underestimated as these combined floods are not considered,” said Prof Nicholls. “Further climate change and land subsidence - all deltas sink - is increasing the likelihood of flooding. Therefore, the threat is growing in all coastal cities and especially delta cities where all these issues occur.” 
 
The team used an atmosphere, ocean, and coast model (AOCM) of the Shanghai region that for the first time includes all the flood drivers. Taking 10 historic typhoon events that produced significant floods, they simulated how they will change over the next 75 years to 2100, with different amounts of climate change and land subsidence. 
 
Lead author Prof Min Zhang, of Shanghai Normal University, said: “We find that the area flooded in a typhoon by an extreme, one in 200-year event - an event that should be considered in disaster risk management and flood planning - could increase by up to 80 percent in 2100”. 
 
“The response to this challenge will almost certainly be raising of defences as Shanghai and most delta cities are already defended. However, rising water levels, especially due to the combination of subsidence, sea-level rise and higher surges during typhoons raise the prospect of catastrophic failure and large, deep floods if the defences fail.” 
 
Prof Nicholls added: “This so-called ‘polder effect’ when defences fail is not fully appreciated. It must be carefully considered in adaptation planning in Shanghai and other deltaic cities. Rather than depending on a single line of defences, layered defence is needed to make these cities more resilient today and into the future.” 
 
‘Growing Compound Flood Risk Driven by Both Climate Change and Land Subsidence Challenges Flood Risk Reduction in Major Delta Cities’, is published in the journal One Earth.

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Journal

One Earth

Article Title

Growing Compound Flood Risk Driven by Both Climate Change and Land Subsidence Challenges Flood Risk Reduction in Major Delta Cities

Article Publication Date

3-Dec-2025

Ozymandias on the Potomac: American Decline in the Fossil Fuel Age

By the time Donald Trump leaves office in 2029, this country will be distinctly on the imperial decline amid fast-paced changes that will make electric vehicles universal and solar-powered electricity an economic imperative.


U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers during an executive order signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

LONG READ


Alfred W. Mccoy
Nov 28, 2025

TomDispatch

At the dawning of the British Empire in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned a memorable sonnet freighted with foreboding about the inevitable decline of all empires, whether in ancient Egypt or then-modern Britain.

In Shelly’s stanzas, a traveler in Egypt comes across the ruins of a once-monumental statue, with “a shattered visage lying half sunk” in desert sands bearing the “sneer of cold command.” Only its “trunkless legs of stone” remain standing. Yet the inscription carved on those stones still proclaims: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And in a silent mockery of such imperial hubris, all the trappings of that awesome power, all the palaces and fortresses, have been utterly erased, leaving only a desolation “boundless and bare” as “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Taken too literally, those verses might lead us to anticipate some future traveler finding fragments of St. Paul’s Cathedral scattered on the banks of the Thames River in London or stones from the Washington Monument strewn in a kudzu-covered field near the Potomac. Shelley is, however, offering us a more profound lesson that every empire teaches and every imperialist then forgets: Imperial ascent begets an inevitable decline.

Imperial Washington

Indeed, these days Donald Trump’s Washington abounds with monuments to overblown imperial grandeur and plans for more, all of which add up to an unconvincing denial that America’s global imperium is facing an Ozymandias-like fate. With his future Gilded Age ballroom meant to rise from the rubble of the White House’s East Wing, his plans for a massive triumphal arch at the city’s entrance, and a military parade of tanks and troops clanking down Constitution Avenue on his birthday, who could ever imagine such a thing? Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure.

In a celebration of his “works” that are supposedly making the “mighty despair” in foreign capitals around the world, his former national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, has recently argued in Foreign Affairs that the president’s “policy of peace through strength” is reversing a Democrat-induced decline of U.S. global power. According to O’Brien, instead of crippling NATO (as his critics claim), President Trump is “leading the biggest European rearmament of the postwar era”; unleashing military innovation “to counter China”; and proving himself the “indispensable global statesman by driving efforts to bring peace to… long-standing disputes” in Gaza, the Congo, and, quite soon, Ukraine as well. Even in North America, according to O’Brien, Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland has forced Denmark to expand its military presence, putting Russia on notice that the West will compete for control of the Arctic.

As it happens, whatever the truth of any of that may be, the policy elements that O’Brien cites are certain to prove largely irrelevant to the ceaseless struggle for geopolitical power among the globe’s great empires. Or, to borrow a favorite Trumpian epithet from the president’s “cornucopia of crudeness,” in the relentless, often ruthless world of grand strategy, none of those factors amounts to a hill of “shit.”

Indeed, O’Brien’s epic catalogue of Trump’s supposed foreign policy successes cleverly avoids any mention of the central factor in the rise and fall of every dominant world power for the past 500 years: energy. While the United States made genuine strides toward a green energy revolution under President Joe Biden, his successor, the “drill, baby, drill” president, has seemed determined not just to destroy those gains, but to revert to dependence on fossil fuels “bigly,” as Trump would say. In a perplexing paradox, President Trump’s systematic attack on alternative energy at home will almost certainly subvert America’s geopolitical power abroad. How and why? Let me explain by dipping my toes in a bit of history.

For the past five centuries, the rise of every global empire has rested on an underlying transformation (or perhaps revolution would be a more accurate word for it) in the form of energy that drove its version of the world economy. Innovation in the basic force behind its rising global presence gave each successive hegemonic power — Portugal, Spain, England, the United States, and possibly now China — a critical competitive advantage, cutting costs and increasing profits. That energy innovation and the lucrative commerce it created infused each successive imperium with intangible but substantial power, impelling its armed forces relentlessly forward and crushing resistance to its rule, whether by local groups or would-be imperial rivals. Although scholars of imperial history often ignore it, energy should be considered, as I argued in my book To Govern the Globe, the determinative factor in the rise and fall of every global hegemon for the past five centuries.

Iberia’s Mastery of Muscle

In the fifteenth century, the Iberian powers — Portugal and Spain — manipulated the ocean winds and maximized the energy output of the human body, giving them new forms of energy that allowed their arid lands and limited populations to conquer much of the globe. By replacing the square sail of lumbering Mediterranean ships with a triangular sail, agile Portuguese vessels like the famed caravela de armada doubled their capacity to tack close to the wind, allowing them to master the world’s oceans.

By 1500, Portuguese warships had navigation instruments that allowed them to cross the widest bodies of water, sails to beat into the strongest headwinds, a sturdy hull for guns and cargo, and lethal cannons that could destroy enemy fleets or breach the walls of port cities. As a result, a small flotilla of Portuguese caravels soon conquered colonies on both sides of the South Atlantic Ocean and seized control of Asian sea lanes from the Red Sea to the Java Sea.

For the next three centuries, such sailing ships would transport 11 million African captives across the Atlantic to work as slaves in a new form of agriculture that was both exceptionally cruel and extraordinarily profitable: the sugar plantation. The output of Europe’s free yeoman farmers was then constrained by the limits of the individual body and the temperate climate’s short six-month growing season. By contrast, enslaved laborers, massed into efficient teams in tropical latitudes, were driven year-round to the brink of death and beyond to extract unprecedented productivity and profits from those plantations. Indeed, even as late as the nineteenth century, the U.S. southern slave plantation was, according to an econometric analysis, 35% more efficient than a northern family farm.

After developing the sugar plantation, or fazenda, as a new form of agribusiness on small islands off the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese brought that system to Brazil in the sixteenth century. From there, it migrated to European colonies in the Caribbean, making that cruel commerce synonymous with the slave trade for nearly four centuries. So profitable was the slave plantation for its owners that, unlike almost every other form of production, it did not die from natural economic causes but would instead require the full force of the British navy to do it in.

The Dutch Harness the Winds

But the true masters of wind power would prove to be the Dutch, whose technological prowess would allow their small land, devoid of natural resources, to conquer a colonial empire that spanned three continents. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch drive for scientific innovation led them to harness the winds as never before, building sailing ships 10 times the size of a Portuguese caravel and windmills that, among other things, replaced the tedious hand sawing of logs to produce lumber for shipbuilding. With giant sails spanning over 90 feet, a five-ton shaft generating up to 50 horsepower, and several sawing frames with six steel blades each, a windmill’s four-man crew could turn 60 tree trunks a day into uniform planks to maintain the massive Dutch merchant fleet of 4,000 ocean-going ships.

By 1650, the Zaan district near Amsterdam, arguably Europe’s first major industrial area, had more than 50 wind-driven sawmills and was the world’s largest shipyard, launching 150 hulls annually (at half the cost of English-built vessels). Many of these were the Dutch-designed fluitschip, an agile three-masted cargo vessel that cut crew size, doubled sailing speed, and could carry 500 tons of cargo with exceptional efficiency.

Through its commercial acumen and mastery of wind power, tiny Holland defeated the mighty Spanish empire in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), then fought the British to a standstill in three massive naval wars, while building an empire that reached around the world — from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the city of New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan.

When Coal Was King

As Holland’s commercial empire began to fade, however, Great Britain was already launching an energy transition to coal-fired steam energy that would leave the wind and muscle power of the Iberian age in the dust of history. And the industrial revolution that went with it would build the world’s first truly global empire.

The Scottish inventor James Watt perfected the steam engine by 1784. Such machines began driving railways in 1825 and the Royal Navy’s warships in the 1840s. By then, an armada of steam engines was transforming the nature of work worldwide — driving sawmills, pulling gang plows, and sculpting the earth’s surface with steam shovels, steam dredges, and steam rollers. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of steam engines in the United States would triple from 56,000 units to 156,000, accounting for 77% of all American industrial power. To fuel that age of steam and steel, Britain’s coal production climbed to a peak of 290 million tons in 1913, while worldwide production reached 1.3 billion tons.

Coal was the catalyst for an industrial revolution that fused steam technology with steel production to make Britain the master of the world’s oceans. From the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, tiny Britain with just 40 million people would preside over a global empire that controlled a quarter of all humanity directly through colonies and another quarter indirectly through client states. In addition to its vast territorial empire, Britannia ruled the world’s waves, while its pound sterling became the global reserve currency, and London the financial center of the planet.

America’s Petrol-Powered Hegemony

Just as Britain’s imperial age had coincided with its coal-driven industrial revolution, so Washington’s brand-new world order focused on crude oil to feed the voracious energy needs of its global economy. By 1950, in the wake of World War II, the U.S. petrol-powered economy was producing half the world’s economic output and using that raw economic power for commercial and military dominion over most of the planet (outside the Sino-Soviet communist bloc).

By 1960, the Pentagon had built a nuclear triad that gave it a formidable strategic deterrent, as five nuclear-powered submarines armed with atomic warheads trolled the ocean depths, while 14 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers patrolled the world’s oceans. Flying from 500 U.S. overseas military bases, the Strategic Air Command had 1,700 bombers ready for nuclear strikes.

As American automobile ownership climbed from 40 million units in 1950 to 200 million in 2000, the country’s oil consumption surged from 6.5 million barrels daily to a peak of 20 million. During those same decades, the federal government spent $370 billion to cover the country with 46,000 miles of interstate highways, allowing cars and trucks to replace railroads as the ribs of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

To drive the carbon-fueled economy of Washington’s world order, there would be a dramatic, five-fold increase in the global consumption of liquid fossil fuels during the last half of the twentieth century. As the number of motor vehicles worldwide kept climbing, crude oil rose from 27% of global fossil-fuel consumption in 1950 to 44% by 2003, surpassing coal to become the world’s main source of energy.

To meet this relentlessly rising demand, the Middle East’s share of global oil production climbed from just 7% in 1945 to 35% in 2003. As the self-appointed guardian of the Persian Gulf whose vast oil reserves represented some 60% of the world’s total, Washington would become embroiled in endless wars in that tumultuous region, from the Gulf War of 1990-91 to its present-day interventions in Israel and Iran.

Whether thanks to Britain’s coal-fired factories or America’s auto traffic, all those carbon emissions were already producing signs of global warming that, by the 1990s, would set alarm bells ringing among scientists worldwide. From the “pre-industrial” baseline of 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1880, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere kept climbing to 410 ppm by 2018, resulting in the rising seas, devastating fires, raging storms, and protracted droughts that came to be known as global warming.

As evidence of the climate crisis became undeniable, the world’s nations responded with striking unanimity by signing the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to cut carbon emissions and surge investments into alternative energy that soon yielded significant breakthroughs in both cost and efficiency. Within four years, the International Energy Agency predicted that dramatic drops in the cost of solar panels meant that solar energy would soon be “the new king of the world’s electricity markets.” Indeed, as technology slashed the cost of battery storage and solar panels, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported in 2024 that the solar generation of electricity had become 41% cheaper than fossil fuels, while offshore wind was 53% cheaper — a truly significant disparity that will, as technology continues to slash the cost of solar energy, render the use of coal and natural gas for electricity an economic irrationality, if not an utter absurdity.

In the game of empires, seemingly small margins can have large consequences, often marking the difference between dominance and subordination, success and failure — whether the 35% advantage of enslaved over free labor, the 50% cost advantage for Dutch sailing craft over British ones, and now a 41% savings for solar over fossil fuels. Moreover, the day is fast coming when fossil-fuel electricity will cost more than twice as much as alternative energy from solar and wind power.

To assure America’s economic future, the administration of President Joe Biden began investing trillions of dollars in alternative energy by building battery plants, encouraging massive wind and solar projects, and continuing a consumer subsidy to sustain Detroit’s transition to electric vehicles. In January 2025, however, Donald Trump entered the White House (again) determined to roll back the global green revolution. After quitting the Paris climate accord and labeling climate change a “hoax” or “the green new scam,” President Trump has halted construction of major offshore wind projects, ended the subsidy for electric vehicle purchases, and opened yet more federal lands for coal and oil leases. Armed with extraordinary executive powers and a single-minded determination, he will predictably delay, if not derail, America’s transition to alternative energy, missing market opportunities and undercutting the country’s economic competitiveness by chaining it to overpriced fossil fuels.

China’s Green-Energy Ride to Global Power

While Washington was demolishing America’s green energy infrastructure, Beijing has been working to make China a global powerhouse for alternative energy. Ten years ago, its leaders launched a “Made in China 2025” program to storm the heights of the global economy by becoming the world leader in 10 strategic industries, eight of which involved some aspect of the green-energy transformation, including “new materials,” “high-tech ships,” “advanced railways,” “energy-saving and new energy vehicles,” and “energy equipment.” Those “new materials” include China’s virtual monopoly on rare earth minerals, which are absolutely critical to the manufacturing of the key components for renewable energy — specifically, wind turbines, solar panels, energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and hydrogen extraction. In sum, Beijing is already riding the green energy revolution in a serious bid to become the world’s “leading manufacturing superpower” by 2049, while erasing America’s economic edge and its global hegemony in the bargain.

So, you might ask, have any of those seemingly pie-in-the-sky plans already become an economic reality? Given China’s recent progress in key energy sectors, the answer is a resounding yes.

Under its economic plan, China has already come to dominate the world’s solar power industry. In 2024, it cut the wholesale price of its solar panel exports in half and nearly doubled its exports of panel components. To replace its old export “trio” of clothing, furniture, and appliances, Beijing has mandated a “new trio” of solar panels, lithium batteries, and electric cars. And to put what’s happening in perspective, imagine that, in just the month of May, China installed enough wind and solar energy to power a country as big as Poland, reaching an impressive figure that represents half the world’s “total installed solar capacity.” By 2024, China was already producing at least 80% of the world’s solar panel components, dominating the global market, and undercutting would-be competitors in Europe and the U.S. Driving all that explosive growth, China’s investment in clean energy has reached nearly $2 trillion, representing 10% of its gross domestic product, and has been growing at three times the rate of its overall economy, meaning it would soon account for a full 20% of its entire economy.

With similar determination, its electric vehicles (EVs) are now beginning to capture the global car market. By 2024, 17.3 million electric cars were made worldwide, and China produced 70% of them. Not only are Chinese companies opening massive robotic assembly plants worldwide to crank out such cars by the millions, but they are also making the world’s cheapest and best cars — with the YangWang U9-X hitting a world speed record of 308 miles per hour; BYD’s latest plug-in hybrid models, priced at only $13,700 and capable of traveling a record 1,200 miles on a single charge and single tank of gas; the YangWang U8 with a capacity to literally drive across water; and the Xiaomi SU-7 displaying a high-tech driver interface that makes a Tesla look like a Ford Pinto.

Since an EV is just a steel box with a battery, technology will soon allow low-cost electric vehicles to completely eradicate gas guzzlers, enabling China to conquer the global car market — with full electric cars like the self-driving BYD Seagull sedan already priced at $8,000, models like BYD’s Han with a 5-minute charge time that’s faster than pumping a tank of gas, and sedans like the Nio ET7 with a standard range on a single charge of 620 miles. And most of that extraordinary technological progress has happened in less than four years, essentially the time remaining in Donald Trump’s second term in office.

An Agenda for America’s Economic Future

By discouraging alternative energy and encouraging fossil fuels, President Trump is undercutting America’s economic competitiveness in the most fundamental way imaginable. Amid an historic transformation in the world’s energy infrastructure (comparable in scope and scale to the coal-fired industrial revolution), the United States will spend the next three years under his watch digging coal and burning oil and natural gas, while the rest of the industrial world follows China as it pursues technological innovation to the furthest frontiers of the human imagination. Indeed, the latest annual report from the world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, states bluntly that the transition away from fossil fuels is “inevitable” as the world, “led by a surge in cheap solar power in… the Middle East and Asia,” installs more green energy capacity in the next five years than it has in the last 40 combined.

By the time Donald Trump leaves office in 2029, this country will be distinctly on the imperial decline amid fast-paced changes that will make electric vehicles universal and solar-powered electricity an economic imperative. And just as the Dutch used energy technology to capture their imperial moment in the seventeenth century, so the Chinese will undoubtedly do the same in this century.

After all, how can the United States produce competitive products, even for domestic consumption (much less export), if our costs for energy, the basic component of every economic activity, become double those of our competitors? Simply put, it won’t be possible.

If, however, when Donald Trump’s term in office is done, this country moves quickly to recover its capacity for economic rationality, it should be able to regain some version of its place in the world economy. For once the United States rejoins the green energy revolution, it can use its formidable engineering ingenuity to accelerate the development of this transformative technology — simultaneously reducing the CO2 emissions that are choking the planet and securing the livelihoods of average American workers in the bargain.


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Alfred W. Mccoy
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power". Previous books include: "Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation" (University of Wisconsin, 2012), "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project)", "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State", and "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade".
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Storm Claudia hits and Thames Water dumps – again

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

22 November, 2025 
Left Foot Forward

"So how's all that banning bonuses, sending executives to jail bulls*t working out I wonder?"

Storm Claudia swept across the UK this week, causing widely reported floods across Wales, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire. But one quieter casualty lay in Buckinghamshire, where two rare chalk streams, the River Misbourne in Gerrards Cross and the River Chess in Chesham, endured hours of sewage discharges under the label of ‘storm release.’

These rivers, fed by groundwater filtered through chalk bedrock and home to diverse wildlife, saw more than 24 hours of sewage pumped into them by Thames Water in the space of a week.

According to the Bucks Free Press, the Misbourne recorded 23 hours and 15 minutes of discharges even as the river remains in the midst of infrastructure ‘upgrades.’

The pollution came despite Thames Water having recently completed a £20 million upgrade to its treatment works, a project the company claimed would “reduce the need for untreated discharges in wet weather” and deliver a “higher quality of treated effluent.” The company says the capacity upgrades were completed in early 2023, with the improvements to effluent quality finished in early 2025.

Yet the rivers continue to bear the burden of repeated contamination.

This isn’t the first time sewage has derailed community life in Buckinghamshire. In 2024, Chalfont St Giles withdrew from the Best Kept Village competition because pollution in the Misbourne made the area impossible to present as ‘kept’ at all. The parish council publicly urged Thames Water to “clean up its act,” a message that still appears unanswered.

In September 2024, the government introduced sweeping powers to crack down on Thames Water and the wider water industry. Those reforms promised environmental protection, financial accountability, automatic fines for pollution, bonus bans, and even possible jail time for senior executives.

Yet Storm Claudia has offered a test of those powers, and the results are hard to ignore.

Environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey summed up the public mood in a post on X, writing: “Bucks chalk streams have seen over 24hours of sewage discharged into them by Thames Water in a week. So how’s all that banning bonuses, sending executives to jail bulls*t working out I wonder?”

‘Beggars belief’: Londoners baffled by bizarre AI Christmas mural


By AFP
November 19, 2025


The display at first glance seems to depict a jolly crowd enjoying the festive season - Copyright AFP Pablo PORCIUNCULA

People in London were left baffled Wednesday by what appeared to be a botched AI-generated Christmas mural showing a Santa-like figure with a half-orange beard and revellers with disfigured faces.

The display in posh Kingston upon Thames in southwest London at first glance seems to depict a jolly crowd enjoying the festive season.

But closer inspection reveals a disturbing array of figures including people with warped faces, a snowman with strange facial features, and dogs with the heads of birds all bizarrely splashing through water.

A Father Christmas figure is pictured looking pained in the water at the foot of a rock. His eyes are shut, and his beard is half orange and half white.

The large-scale mural looms above several popular riverside restaurants in the upmarket town.

People who had seen it — and others keen to have their say — took to social media for a lively discussion.

“The entire thing is horrendous,” wrote one.

“I’m equal parts delighted and horrified,” said another.

“It beggars belief that if you’re going to use AI you wouldn’t even take a fraction of the time you’ve allegedly saved in producing whatever this is to at least check it a bit,” added someone else.

“This is magnificent,” chimed in another, prompting someone else to respond: “It’s worse every time you look.”

Kingston Upon Thames Council said in a statement it had had “no involvement in the planning or funding of the display”.

“The landowner has now confirmed to us that they will be removing the installation,” it added.

‘After years of sewage and debt, Thames Water doesn’t deserve another free pass’

Sophie Conquest 19th October, 2025

Photo: Jessica Girvan/Shutterstock

Ofwat is currently deciding whether to let Thames Water pollute our rivers and seas outside of current legal limits for the next 15 years. 

As many of us are already acutely aware, Thames Water is crumbling. It has a debt pile of approximately £20 billion. Households are paying more and more for a broken service. Burst pipes, water outages and road closures have all become new norms. Last year, Thames Water had the highest rate of serious pollution incidents out of all the English water companies.

In an attempt to keep hold of the utility, Thames Water’s creditors (mostly US hedge funds and investment firms that are now using the name London and Valley Water) have put forward a deal to water regulator Ofwat. As part of this deal, they have stated that a ‘full return to legal, regulatory and environmental compliance’ would not take place until at least 2035-2040. Instead, they have put forward their own ‘improvement accountability framework’ as a set of obligations which they are prepared to keep. What does this mean in practice? Thames Water’s creditors want to set their own rules.

Here are five clear reasons why this deal must not go ahead. 

It would result in 15 more years of pollution of our rivers and seas

The deal proposes an expected return to full environmental compliance in 2035-2040, meaning they will be breaching their licence until at least that time. Our rivers and seas simply cannot withstand 15 more years of pollution. 

It would set a dangerous precedent for all other English water companies

If Thames Water can set their own rules – and protect their profits as a result – all other water companies will want to do the same. This decision impacts not just Thames Water households, but every single household in England. 

There is a complete lack of transparency and accountability

Details of the ‘improved accountability framework’ have not been made clear to members of the public. We fund the water system through our bills, and rely on water companies to deliver this essential service. We are the biggest and most important group of stakeholders in our water system, and deserve a say in how it is run. Water is a natural monopoly, meaning that we cannot simply choose to get our water somewhere else if the terms and conditions of one provider don’t suit us.

READ MORE:

It is not the best value for the public purse 

Thames Water creditors have offered a 25% debt write-off. Much more debt would be written off under special administration. The previous government’s plans under Project Timber involved a 40% debt haircut for some creditors. We could cut more.

This is not what this government promised 

This government promised to be tough on water pollution, including a pledge that sewage pollution will be cut in half by the end of the decade. In this deal, Thames Water creditors set out an ‘ambition’ – not even a commitment – to reduce sewage outflows 30% by 2030, which falls significantly short of former Environment Secretary Steve Reed’s target. 

What’s more, Reed has specifically said of Thames Water that ‘it is only right that the company is subject to the same consequences as any other water company’. 

By accepting this deal, this government would be undermining their promised action on sewage not just ahead of the next election, but for the two elections after that.

Subscribe here to our daily newsletter roundup of Labour news, analysis and comment– and follow us on Bluesky, WhatsApp, X and Facebook.

Bring Thames Water into special administration, followed by permanent public ownership

Ofwat has a choice. Special administration is the clear and viable alternative to selling our water system down the river. 

Special administration is a form of temporary public ownership. This mechanism – which exists to protect the running of vital public services – can be used to wipe out a vast proportion of Thames Water’s debts and stabilise the company. 

From there, we must bring water into permanent public ownership. A precedent was set for this by Railtrack, which became publicly owned Network Rail after it was brought into special administration under Blair in 2001. Blair’s government would absolutely have brought Thames Water into public ownership by now. 

Under public ownership, households and environmental groups would have a say on the board of Thames Water, and money that is currently spent on shareholder payouts would be spent on tackling sewage and reducing bills.

We Own It are campaigning for Ofwat so say no to Thames Water’s outrageous deal. Our petition has already been signed by over 15,000 people. You can add your name here.

Sophie Conquest

Sophie Conquest is a Lead Campaigner at public ownership campaigning organisation We Own It.

View all articles by Sophie Conquest

UK

Opinion

Government doubles down on £100 billion water nationalisation price tag – but are they coming clean on the true cost of publicly owned water?

Cat Hobbs 

18 September, 2025 

Left Foot Forward

The current cost is based on a discredited report funded by the private water companies.

The government has tied itself in knots over the cost of nationalising water. Yesterday they released a statement that sees them doubling down on their dodgy £100 billion figure. There’s been some twists and turns along the way, and the government’s logic has not always stacked up.

In February 2018 the Social Market Foundation (SMF) released a report which put the cost of nationalising the water industry at £90 billion. The report was funded by Anglian Water, Severn Trent, South West Water and United Utilities.

In April 2019 Prof. Dieter Helm, an Oxford University economist specialising in utilities, said the SMF report had “virtually no intellectual substance and the [£90bn] figure was wrong.” Moody’s, the credit ratings agency, valued the water companies at £14.5 billion at this point.

In July 2024 Lord Sikka, a Professor of Accounting, asked Baroness Hayman, Environment Under-Secretary, for the details of the calculation used by her department. She later replied the cost was “calculated in a report published by the Social Market Foundation” – the very same discredited report funded by the private water companies.

Both the SMF report and the DEFRA calculations rely on Regulatory Capital Value (RCV). This calculation takes the value of the water industry at the time of privatisation in 1989, adds on the value of investment over 35 years, then adds on inflation. RCV enables greater payouts to shareholders and – in the words of Ewan McGaughey, Professor of Law at Kings College London – it is ‘cynically calculated to scare gullible governments off public ownership’.

The value of an asset is always determined by what the market is willing to pay for it – surely that’s economics 101.

Thames Water is a case in point of RCV’s complete detachment from financial reality. Under the RCV calculation, Thames Water is valued at £21 billion. So why have the owners failed to flog it to KKR for the knockdown price of £4 billion?

It feels as though the government is deliberately missing the point, to justify the ongoing rip off of households instead of standing up for the public interest.

This latest explanation from DEFRA fails to acknowledge that one third of our water bills leak out directly to pay for debt and dividends, and that over the next five years households will pay out £22 billion to shareholders and banks.

It ignores the powers and levers held by the government. Parliament can decide on appropriate compensation for nationalisation, weighing up public interest versus shareholder interest. And the government itself creates the regulatory framework for water which decides its market value. If it gets super tough on sewage and bills, the value of these water companies will plummet.

There is no mention of the fact that when you buy a profitable asset, you – we, the British public – also get a profitable asset. Nor of the fact that our English water companies are almost entirely foreign owned so the government is not defending us but shareholders abroad.

DEFRA totally sidesteps the very live issue of Thames Water and what should happen when these natural monopolies load up debt at the expense of households. The government could take Thames Water into public ownership tomorrow, slash the debt by half, refinance it more cheaply, invest in stopping sewage, reduce bills, defend the public interest and give households and environmental groups a role on the board.

But most importantly, Greenwich University research shows that even if shareholders did receive £90 billion in compensation, this would still be a good deal for the public purse, enabling savings of £3 billion a year.

If the government wants to win back trust it must prove it is acting in the public interest. Come clean on the true cost of public ownership and show that they are willing to protect us from the greed of the polluting profiteers.

Telegraph inaccurately calculated ‘one in 12 in London is illegal migrant’ stat, IPSO rules

Basit Mahmood 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward

IPSO found that the Telegraph had reported on the Thames Water findings in a way that was “inaccurate, misleading, or distorted”.

Another right-wing paper has been found to have made a misleading claim when it comes to migrants.

IPSO, the newspaper regulator, has found that The Telegraph’s sums to conclude that “one in 12 in London” is an illegal migrant were inaccurate. The misleading claim was also picked up by the Daily Mail which tried to say that it was fine for it to use the claim without checking because it was “reasonable for it to assume the central premise was accurate”.

The paper’s front-page article in January relied upon a study commissioned by Thames Water and obtained under freedom of information laws.

Press Gazette reports: “The analysis found that there were between 390,355 and 585,533 illegal migrants in the Thames Water London Water Resource Zone.

“The Telegraph used these figures and a population estimate of 7,044,667 to say “that would mean one in 12 of the capital’s population is an illegal migrant”.

“However IPSO noted that by The Telegraph’s own admission, this calculation was done inaccurately.”

IPSO ruled: “It had failed to add the estimated migrant population to the overall population it had based the article upon.

“In addition, it had not taken account of the fact, in its reporting, that the report was based on the population of the Thames Water London Water Resource Zone – rather than of London itself.”

IPSO found that the Telegraph had reported on the Thames Water findings in a way that was “inaccurate, misleading, or distorted”.

It’s important for media organisations to recognise that printing false and misleading claims in newspapers has real life consequences for communities.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

UK

‘To end austerity, wealth taxes are a moral and economic necessity’

Bell Ribeiro-Addy 12th August, 2025

Photo: Alex Segre/Shutterstock

The UK is at a crossroads. This government inherited the dire legacy of a lost decade of cuts, austerity and underinvestment. The 2010s saw average real pay fall: the first decade in which this has happened since before the Second World War. Meanwhile, since 2010, billionaires have sat back and watched their wealth more than double. 

What do we have to show for this? Crumbling public services, rising child poverty, stagnant wages and sluggish growth. 

Governing in the state that the Conservatives left us in was never going to be easy. But anyone paying attention to the mood of the country can only conclude: this government needs to dramatically change its approach to turn things around.

Breaking out of this economic doom loop demands bold ideas from beyond the normal playbook. It’s why myself and many parliamentary colleagues, including former Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, as well as Nobel prize winning economists, unions, NGOs and more are calling for wealth taxes on Britain’s super-rich corporations and individuals to unlock billions for public investment and finally close the door on the era of austerity.

That means looking seriously at bold ideas that reach outside the normal playbook. It’s why myself and many parliamentary colleagues, including former Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, as well as Nobel prize winning economists, unions, NGOs and more are calling for wealth taxes on Britain’s super-rich corporations and individuals to unlock billions for public investment and finally close the door on the era of austerity.

‘If we do not tackle inequality, this will create an opening for other parties’

Why wealth taxes? Our society has always been unequal but inequality in the UK has exploded in the last 30 years. Today, there are two Britains. The Britain of the ultra-wealthy. Of billionaires like the Duke of Westminster, who inherited £9 billion tax-free aged 25. Billionaires who added £35 million to their wealth every single day last year, but currently pay an effective tax rate of close to 0.3% of their wealth. Of corporations like Thames Water who pay their CEOs eyewatering salaries as they pump sewage into our rivers and hike our bills. 

Then there is the Britain most of us live in, where we have seen the longest hit to living standards on record. Where 1 in 3 kids now grow up in poverty and the dream of home ownership is out of reach for millions. 

Voters feel this. Polling from YouGov, commissioned by Green New Deal Rising as part of their PAY UP campaign, found that 58% of Brits believe this Government’s economic policies currently best serve wealthy individuals (40%) and large corporations (18%) compared to UK businesses (3%), the working population (3%), and ordinary British people (2%). There is a clear need to show people that this government is on their side and willing to challenge an unfair economic status quo which has allowed the rich to get richer than ever whilst most of us face declining wealth and living standards.

We have to tell this story. If we do not, we can be sure that other parties will. Recent analysis by Persuasion UK found that while Reform UK poses a threat to 123 Labour constituencies, far more (250) Labour constituencies are at risk from the Greens and Lib Dems. If we do not tackle the issues we have inherited: from skyrocketing wealth inequality to the housing crisis, this will only create an opening for other parties.

‘The moral and political case is overwhelming’

The moral and political case for wealth taxes is overwhelming but they are also simply a practical necessity. Delivering change doesn’t come cheap. We urgently need to find new revenue streams to avoid more politically disastrous, life-threatening cuts and fund investment in communities. A wealth tax of just 2% on net wealth above £10 million would raise £24 billion per year. We can no longer afford to ignore such a large source of revenue. 

Despite predictable right-wing media reports to the contrary, we also know that the UK’s super rich are staying put and the vast majority do not move due to tax changes. Their lives, families, businesses, and communities are here. Overwhelmingly, they want to stay and give back to the country which has given them so much.

Most claims to the contrary are based on a single study by a firm that sells golden passports to the ultra-wealthy. This study was the source of 30 articles every day last year claiming millionaires were leaving in their droves in response to tax policy changes. 

In reality, the report actually found just a 0.31% rate of migration for UK millionaires. Even this tiny figure was derived using highly questionable methodology, with Henley and Partners basing its estimates on where millionaires say they work on social media; not where they actually reside. A far more reliable measure of the validity of this argument is the just 0.01% of richest households that relocated after wealth tax reforms were introduced in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

‘Pursuing further cuts or raising taxes is politically and morally untenable’

The truth is that none of the choices before us are easy. Like any other major policy, a wealth tax would need to be carefully designed, learning from other countries and using the brightest minds in public taxation to make it work.

Pursuing further cuts or raising taxes on ordinary people is politically and morally untenable. So let’s be bold. Wealth taxes aren’t a silver bullet but they are a crucial piece in the puzzle, helping raise the money needed to deliver real change and signal to the public that we are on their side. This budget is a crucial opportunity to show we have listened. It is one of our last chances to introduce policies which have time to bed in and show their benefits before the next election. Let’s not miss it

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill.@BellRibeiroAddy

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