In ruling that communities were now entitled to sue those responsible for dumping sewage into Britain’s waterways, the judges of the Supreme Court were opening the floodgates. The deluge of writs that will now ensue will wash away years of obscene profiteering and perhaps the water firms themselves.
There will be many parallels drawn with Tony Blair’s triumph of 1997 but the mood music today is closer to that of 1979, when Margaret Thatcher assumed control of a country many believed was ungovernable: an economic train wreck controlled by trade unions and headed for global irrelevance. The last few years have demonstrated that the wheel has turned full circle. The difference this time is that UK plc has been rendered unmanageable by incompetence rather than insurgence.