Secret Local Government Officer

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Secret Local Government Officer

Secret Local Government Officer

@secret_local

Expert in tone, cynical & professional nuisance.

Katılım Mart 2020
5K Takip Edilen4.5K Takipçiler
Secret Local Government Officer retweetledi
James Melville 🚜
James Melville 🚜@JamesMelville·
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: "These water companies say they're putting £billions in." Feargal Sharkey: "They’ve taken away £84 billion of our money in dividends and created £74 billion of debt…We've been cheated.”
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Dan Neidle
Dan Neidle@DanNeidle·
Douglas Barrowman made a fortune from selling tax avoidance schemes. When the schemes failed, his companies aggressively sold their clients another avoidance scheme which supposed rescued them from the first scheme. It was all a scam. A disaster for the clients.
Dan Neidle tweet media
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Prem Sikka
Prem Sikka@premnsikka·
Water Follies 35 years before privatisation 100 reservoirs built; no major English reservoir since. Thames Water sold-off 25 reservoirs. Southern Water to decommission 43 of 93 by 2030. Companies paid £85bn in dividends, borrowed £70bn. People fleeced. leftfootforward.org/2025/06/nation…
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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
Oh look, spot inspections reveal that 1 in 5 water company discharge permits are being breached. Who'd have guessed. Question is what are the @EnvAgency ever going to do about any it? Oh and how is that now three and a half year old "largest ever criminal investigation" into permit breaches going? Hmm?!
Steph Spyro@StephSpyro

Water firms breached their environmental permits in around 20% of spot checks carried out by a watchdog. The Environment Agency, which only began recording these unexpected inspections from April last year, found 420 breaches in 2,027 probes. express.co.uk/news/uk/202172…

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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
"Reed has ruled out nationalisation, saying it would cost up to £100bn". Let me be very clear about this, any reference to a £100 billion cost to nationalise the water industry is a demonstratively, blatant, provable, untruth. That figure relates to a report commission by 4 water companies @AnglianWater, @stwater, @SouthWestWater and @uugroupplc and referred to by @Dieter_Helm Fellow in Economics, New College, Oxford as "economically illiterate". @tomespiner bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
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Prem Sikka
Prem Sikka@premnsikka·
Five more water companies in England appeal against Ofwat’s 36% average bill hike They want more People can't appeal, have to pay up, put up with sewage in rivers, exploitation normalized. Corporations rule and no one is protecting people. theguardian.com/business/2025/…
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Prem Sikka
Prem Sikka@premnsikka·
40% of the world's dirty money laundered through London, UK Overseas Territories, Crown Dependencies. Govt can issue Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWO). Since 2017, SEVEN UWOs issued. ZERO prosecutions/convictions. Contrast it with attacks on little people. questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questi…
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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
The Ilchester Estate was fined £28,000 for over abstracting a local chalk stream by 35 cubic meters of water per day. Collectively water companies over abstracted England's chalk streams by about 1,300,000 cubic meters per day. And the @EnvAgency does what? hellorayo.co.uk/greatest-hits/…
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WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks@wikileaks·
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives. The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN. Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at archive.org. Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted. IN has at least six captive subsidiaries under unrelated names including one based out of the Cayman Islands. Since 2008, when electronic records begin, more than 95% of IN's budget has been supplied by the US government (thread follows)
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Stella Assange
Stella Assange@Stella_Assange·
Shocking update from independent journalist @richimedhurst—if you can, please help contribute to his gfm/paypal so he can replace the reporting equipment that Austrian agents have seized. #JournalismIsNotACrime
Richard Medhurst@richimedhurst

I was detained this week by the Austrian police and intelligence services. They raided my house, office, and took all my devices. They are accusing me of being a member of Hamas and threatened me with 10 years in prison. Journalism is not a crime.

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James Melville 🚜
James Melville 🚜@JamesMelville·
I’ve never voted Tory in my life and I thought the last Tory government was dreadful. But this bloke is the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime. He’s the diametric opposite of what Labour should stand for. In fact, he stands for absolute nothing apart from his own dishonesty.
James Melville 🚜 tweet media
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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
Appears the French aren't happy with our sh*t washing up on their beaches. "In the United Kingdom, this scandal that poisons the rivers. Privatised since Thatcher and the victim of under-investment, the sewer network is overflowing and waste water is flowing into the Channel and the North Sea."
Le20h-France Télévisions@le20hfrancetele

💀💧 Au Royaume-Uni, ce scandale qui empoisonne les rivières Privatisé depuis Thatcher et victime de sous-investissements, le réseau d'égouts déborde allègrement et les eaux usées se déversent dans la Manche et la mer du Nord.

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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
Thames Water tells the High Court that it's currently spending £15 million PER MONTH on lawyers and advisers and that next year interest payments on its steaming debt pile will be between £800 to £900 million. Wanna guess who's money it is they're spending? ft.com/content/40b545…
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Prem Sikka
Prem Sikka@premnsikka·
High Court hearing today on Thames Water plan to borrow £3bn. Already has £17bn debt, funded dividends, wants 53% price hike. A third of customer bill covers interest payments. More debt= higher bills. Let it go bankrupt. Nationalise at nominal price. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
Oh deary me, they just can't bloody well help themselves can they. @SouthernWater's under siege CEO has taken to gaslighting parliament. Now trying to make us all believe that the policy and regulatory change needed by water companies to allow them to fix all of this was brought about by campaigners and he thinks we're all terribly fabulous people and now wants to work with us... Try it this way. The law was clear in 1991. It was updated in 1994. The court told you so in 2012 and yet again in 2021. Here's a hint. We don't need or want your false, insincere flattery, try doing your bloody job, comply with the law and we need never speak each others names ever again. Or perhaps you should have just done that in the first place, 35 years ago.
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Carole Cadwalladr
Carole Cadwalladr@carolecadwalla·
I gave this TED talk warning Silicon Valley of the profound threat of it posed to democracy nearly 6 years ago. It provoked a lawsuit that caused me years of pain. The UK government did nothing to contain the threat. And here we are.
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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
Q: How does a water company get a 4 star rating from the @EnvAgency? A: Make sure at least half of your sewage dumping monitors aren't working or are offline. Easy-peasy. Wouldn't that be right @stwater?
Windrush WASP@WindrushWasp

Why has Severn Trent Water got so many untreated sewage monitors offline when so many across the country are discharging? 166 discharging - 165 offline. (source @theriverstrust) @SteveReedMP @EnvAgency @Ofwat @DefraGovUK @SevernTrentLife

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Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey@Feargal_Sharkey·
"Sewage released at 41 beaches in Cornwall after heavy rain." Yep, you've read that right. Currently 41 beaches in Cornwall are carrying sewage pollution warnings. Now what bit of any of that rain at the weekend would qualify as "EXCEPTIONAL weather", or "EXCEPTIONAL circumstances"? Yep, that'll be none. cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-…
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