Jen Ackroyd

What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock operate less like investors and more like modern feudal landlords. They buy essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities, often using vast amounts of borrowed money and paying prices that ordinary market participants cannot match. Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is pushed onto the acquired company itself. The result is simple: the public pays. Consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and declining service quality. The infrastructure becomes a cash-extraction machine. Profits flow upward to shareholders and executives, while the financial burden flows downward to households. When the model inevitably breaks down, the consequences are socialised. Communities are left with crumbling infrastructure, polluted rivers, and failing services. Thames Water's £14 billion debt mountain and repeated sewage scandals are a stark example of what happens when financial engineering takes precedence over public stewardship. The executives who loaded the company with debt have already collected their bonuses. The investors have already taken their returns. And when the system finally reaches breaking point, taxpayers are expected to pick up the bill. Privatise the gains. Socialise the losses. That is the business model.

Some incredible footage of an Orca breaching clean out of the water beside Serenity 4. Thanks Nathan our crewman for the video. @NorthEastTweets @VisitNland

Since privatisation, water companies sold off 25 reservoirs without building a single major one. Now they want bill payers to fund a few new projects. Too little, too late. Privatised greed is putting us at risk during a climate emergency. To build resilience, we need public ownership.

The River Wye has just made UK history. For the first time, an entire river catchment has been formally recognised as a living ecosystem with rights - including the right to flow, thrive, regenerate, and be free from pollution. It's a major victory for nature.

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it. Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at. Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets. That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting. This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid. So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram. The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck. And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

@SamaHoole @ScotBorderOG THIS! Please read and share widely!

🚨BREAKING : first woman BLOODY DID IT!🥇

No axe to grind and clarity of point. We didn’t vote to be worse off financially, educationally, scientifically, holidayingly ( I know there is no such word😂) and health wise.

Brilliant!🤣

We are in capitalism’s final stage, where global capital can’t expand or sustain past profits. It now consumes public institutions and key systems, sacrificing democracy, welfare, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and ecosystems for short-term gain.

We are just Germany in the 1930s instead of blaming Jews we are blaming migrants. But they aren't responsible for Austerity, Brexit or the profiteering crisis. #bbcqt

عمري 29 سنة، لكن والله هذا من أجمل الأشياء اللي شفتها بحياتي… ردة الفعل بالفيديو مستحيل توصف !

107,000 children are in care in the UK, more than 40% are in the private sector which charges an average of £384,020 a child and makes £80,000+ profit per child that goes straight to shareholders While Foster Parents are given just £15,000 a year even though they do a better job

Reform-led Durham council cut off funding to the annual Pride celebrations. So trade unions launched a fundraiser to save it, eventually raising more money than was cut. Which means this year's Pride will be bigger than ever. In the 1980s, the LGBT+ community raised thousands of pounds to help striking miners and their families. When we stick up for each other, we can achieve anything.

While arguing that Next can't afford to pay 16-24 year olds the minimum wage, CEO Lord Wolfson forgot to say that for the fiscal year ending January 2026, Next reported an operating profit of £1.236 billion, marking a 13.4% increase from the previous year. #r4today

@jwsal At least private landlords provide housing. The 100s of thousands of Holiday Lets in England are totally unregulated. Subsidised x 2 by Govt. Allowed to pay no C Tax or Biz Rates. Govt then pay L Auth for Biz Rates NOT collected. Nobody knows how many there are. Owners? Safety?

Private landlords are costing the UK £40 billion in housing benefit every year. They are a drain on the economy and do no work, providing no productivity or growth.

Can't overstate how important it is to celebrate and publicize these historic wins in the face of huge rightwing ideological & political apparatuses.

.@LindsayHoyle_MP Dear Sir Lindsay, Helen Whately is misleading the House. No one EVER got a Motability car for tennis elbow or acne. She presents no evidence because there is none. She is lying to whip up hatred of disabled people. Please refer her to the Privileges Committee.

Zohran Mamdani just forced Jeff Bezos to pay New York City $9 million in fines his company owed. This is exactly why we elect politicians who aren’t bought by corporations: they actually hold powerful people accountable instead of protecting them.

Tesco are making £4bn a year in profit. About 50% of their staff are on Universal Credit. Why don't we crackdown on this unneeded benefit for billionaires?