ENVIRONMENTAL VANDALISM AND PINKWASHING
by
‘The total inability of Ofwat to regulate companies properly has destroyed any confidence we can have in our system of private water monopolies.’
– 38 Degrees
‘We are never going to fix water in the current ownership model because our money is simply leaking out of the system to service ever more unmanageable levels of debt. Enough of this corporate robbery. Nationalise now.’
– Katy Weitz, Hastings activist
When a few hundred demonstrators from the Gay Liberation Front took to the streets of central London in the 1972 protest which has become known as the UK’s first Pride march, we couldn’t have foreseen what Pride would become half a century later. GLF activism in England was inspired by the 1969 riot at New York’s gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, an uprising against constant violent police raids, fighting back against arrest, mafia-control, persecution and criminalisation—the whole damn shebang of oppression. The gay men, lesbians, drag queens, trans people had had enough. Their resistance began the continuing movement for liberation.
The behemoth Pride has become is always fraught with contradictions, in particular the commercialised, corporate and depoliticised nature of it. The inclusion of state military and policing institutions is not welcomed by all. Serried ranks of grey uniforms step-marching amongst drag queens on roller skates and dykes on bikes and other colourful carnivalesque chaos is a surreal sight. For some of us it’s not part of a delightful spectacle of variety but represents state co-option of a revolutionary movement, indicating a lack—or suppression—of awareness of the role of that military in unjust invasions and wars, racist and sexist violence and murders of BIPOC by those institutions. This year’s sponsorship of Pride in London, by United Airlines, has been rightfully opposed by groups like Just Stop Oil and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants.
Human rights activists have protested the grotesque aspects that have become—or tried to become—incorporated in the event, the inclusion of right-wing groups such as UKIP or zionist groups e.g. The spirit of Pride, its celebratory and defiant essence , is more likely to be found in smaller or specific events, where local communities dispense with corporate sponsorship. It is still an important fixture in the political calendar, meaning a lot to many people. And when opportunities arise to uphold its founding principles we can seek to assert the radical roots. For example, at WorldPride in London in 2012 where supporters of the Palestinian quest for justice forefronted the Israeli regime’s use of pinkwashing. The Israeli state has invested huge sums of money in tourism propaganda to try to beat the growing boycott movement. The slogan No Pride in Occupation was coined by campaigners against the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and has variously been adapted e.g. as No Pride in Israeli Apartheid.
Pinkwashing—sometimes called rainbow-washing—refers to the co-option and takeover of radical activism by corporate institutions and oppressive regimes to present themselves as promoting social justice, to camouflage their crimes. Cynical hijacking of the hard-won rights of LGBT+ people was used to attempt to portray Israel as modern, liberal society, welcoming gay tourists to Tel Aviv beaches and clubs. It’s a familiar backlash strategy, used by systems recognising a threat to their stability and vested interests.
A rainbow flag, with its bright prismatic symbolism of humanity’s diversity, can raise the spirits, but may dampen them when splashed across the face of Coutts Bank.
RED FLAGS
So, you may be asking, what has all this got to do with the sewage crisis overwhelming our coastal and river ecosystems?
Outrage has grown at the horrendous discharging of sewage by companies who have grabbed the golden egg-laying goose of privatisation to rake in huge profits. Since Thatcher privatised the water industry in 1989 they have laughed all the way to the bank. Which they own. Macquarie Group’s Nicholas O’Kane stands to be the country’s top executive earner after he banked $57.6 million last year, unseating every Australian chief executive in the pay ranks including his own boss, Shemara Wikramanayake.
As the full extent of this devastating destruction of beaches, wildlife, tourism and fishing industries, coastal sports and amenities, and myriad threats to public health, becomes more and more obvious, withholding payment of wastewater bills gains in popularity. Water companies being monopolies who appear to think the earth’s resources are theirs for the spoiling, we consumers have few other ways to express our outrage and refusal to collude. The current scandal regarding Thames Water, asset-stripped by Macquarie, is building to a tipping point at time of writing.
‘Red flags are going up on beaches from Scarborough to Whitstable as pollution levels soar and businesses are forced to close due to sewage discharges … Between 15 May and 30 September last year, sewage was dumped into designated bathing waters more than 5,000 times. There were an average of 825 sewage spills every single day into England’s waterways in 2022. In the north west, United Utilities discharged untreated sewage almost 70,000 times last year, while Severn Trent Water discharged sewage through storm overflows 44,765 times in the same period. In just a single eight-day stretch, Southern Water dumped ‘more than 3,700 hours’ worth of sewage at 83 bathing water beaches.’
According to We Own It, English water companies are more than 90% owned by shareholders abroad, for example: Wessex Water is 100% owned by a Malaysian company, YTL, Northumbrian Water is owned by Hong Kong businessman Li Ka Shin, Thames Water is partly owned by investors from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, China and Australia. Over 90% of the English water companies are owned by international investors, private equity funds, and banks.
Southern Water is responsible for water services here in Kent and Hampshire, Sussex and the Isle of Wight. It is owned by infrastructure investment funds that are 62% managed by Australian firm Macquarie. ‘Macquarie faced political scrutiny during its ownership of Thames Water between 2006 and 2017 as it extracted billions in dividends while Thames’s debt soared. It controversially returned to the industry when taking control of Southern Water in 2021.’
At time of writing, South East Water (via whom we pay our bills to Southern Water) has announced a hosepipe ban, while reportedly leaking 92 million litres of water per day.
Ingeniously, the opaque corporate structures of water and sewage companies are layered with numerous subsidaries, only one of which – the operating company – is regulated by Ofwat. And the crap dumped in the sea and rivers that is preventing swimmers from enjoying a dip probably doesn’t worry you if you have a large private swimming pool like that of Martin Stanley, ‘the former head of Macquarie Asset Management, who directed several transactions for the business, including the acquisition of Thames Water. Stanley, 60, lives in a £2.5 million house in Woodbridge, Suffolk, complete with a swimming pool. In 2021, the year he stepped down from Macquarie, he was paid £10 million.’
JOINING THE DOTS: THE BRITISH LGBT AWARDS
An annual feature of Pride month, this year’s ceremony saw several nominees for the awards withdraw. Activists from Fossil Free Pride had called for an end to corporate sponsorship of the event by Shell and BP. Pink News reported that while the fossil fuel giants had been dropped, the award is now ‘sponsored by Macquarie and Tesco.’
This is hardly an improvement, unfortunately. So far, there has been less focus on the sponsorship by Macquarie than on Shell and BP, because campaigners’ efforts have highlighted the culpability of the latter in the planet-threatening extractive capitalist industries. Public awareness of the damage caused by the fossil fuel industry has grown despite all corporate and governmental efforts to prevent it. An article in openDemocracy describes how ‘LGBTIQ groups are among those urging the LGBT Awards to drop the Macquarie Group over the company’s funding of fossil-fuel projects, which they claim are contributing to climate catastrophe and harming Indigenous communities worldwide … Macquarie is part of the Riverlinx Consortium that is building a new “highly pollutant” four-lane road tunnel under the River Thames.’ Fewer people know of the iniquitous involvement of Macquarie in the sewage pollution scandal now making headlines and why its duplicity should be opposed.
WHO IS MACQUARIE?
A global financial services group, nicknamed ‘the Vampire Kangaroo’ by the financial press, Macquarie has a reputation for ‘asset stripping’ the companies it acquires. It owns vast chunks of infrastructure worldwide, including gas networks, airports and telecoms service companies across the UK. More than 100 million people rely on it for necessary infrastructure; asset managers globally own housing and infrastructure worth over 4 trillion dollars. Macquarie owns Roadchef, a leading UK motorway service area operator, providing access to fast-charging electric vehicle infrastructure. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were behind the EV charging station about to devastate Ambridge’s local economy (apologies to non-Archers fans.)
Incredibly, the inspiration behind this global giant’s name was their admiration for Lachlan Macquarie. A governor of New South Wales, Macquarie was ‘the Australian leader who used terrorism and slaughter to quell hostile Indigenous resistance to invasion and dispossession.’
Widely lauded by white Australians, Macquarie was responsible for giving the orders for the infamous 1816 Appin Massacre of Aboriginal men, women and children.
So, settler colonialism is not only alive and kicking in e.g. Israel today, its legacy haunts Australia and other lands where indigenous peoples continue to resist theft of their land, culture and life. It seems the racist mentality of resource looting, cruelty and indifference to suffering that marks the British empire has morphed into indifference toward human and all other other forms of life disastrously affected by the hubristic financial institutions that rule our world.
NO PRIDE IN PROFITEERING
Macquarie Group vaunts its LGBT-friendly credentials widely and boasts of its commitment to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ for its employees, offering parental leave, support for International Women’s Day and Black Lives Matter and indigenous rights. ‘In seeking meaningful and enduring reconciliation, Macquarie supports constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Peoples of Australia.’ Which is the least it can do I suppose, given its siting on stolen land of the Wallumattagal clan of the Dharug Nation.
The cognitive dissonance this global gaslighting creates emanates from a massive PR effort on the part of international financial interests. Yet no amount of greenwashing or pinkwashing can cover up their crimes.
CITIZEN ACTIVISM
The original Gay Liberationists did not ask for rights and equality, they demanded radical change and would have rejected corporate and state pinkwashing. GLF made common cause and overlapped with the Women’s Liberation Movement, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Trade Unions fighting repressive legislation, British military brutality in Northern Ireland, countries throwing off colonialism, the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement, as part of a tradition of internationalist solidarity subsequently upheld by groups such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners with its continuation today in Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants.
If there are two main strands of much political activism – on the one hand liberal and assimilationist, and on the other a radical seeking of social transformation (for ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’) – then the former has come to predominate in mainstream society, at least in its manifestation in LGBT+ Pride in some countries. This is not to deny important benefits, legal protections and workplace rights accruing from reforms—which can of course be taken away by the same state powers that grant them in the first place, as is happening now in Europe, Britain, USA, as with Italian fascists removing women’s parental status.
However acceptable Pride months or LGBT+ rights have become in some places, they are not safe from attack and backlash, as can be seen now as they are targeted and ridiculed in the ludicrous ‘war on woke’, along with anti-racist school and library books, drag queens, transgender people … ‘With the US besieged by a rightwing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people … blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures. But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say. Since it was formed in 1994, Alliance Defending Freedom has been at the center of a nationwide effort to limit the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, ‘all in the name of Christianity.’ The Conservative Political Action Coalition seeks to remove legal rights and reject progress.
These forces have close links with their UK counterparts, as can be seen by current anti-LGBT+ and anti-reproductive rights lobbying and the speakers at May’s NatCon gathering (who included rightwing Miriam Cates with whom the MP for Canterbury and Whitstable, Rosie Duffield, has recently formed an alliance.) Not coincidentally, the UK dropped down this year from 14th to 17th place in the annual ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map, which ranks nations on their legal and policy situation regarding LGBTQ+ rights. While the situation is not as dire here as in Kenya, Uganda, Turkey or the USA (unless you’re an asylum-seeker), clearly pinkwashing is not going to protect queer people any more than corporate powers hand in glove with politicians are going to protect all citizens and our environment.
With Macquarie warranting a prime place amongst other corporate criminals responsible for the despoliation of our planet, Big Oil, e.g., it’s time to reject their nice shiny greenwashing/pinkwashing rainbow veneer, and hold such financial institutions to account. Refusal of sponsorship by events and organisations needs to join the boycotting of wastewater bills (by those that can safely do so.) As disgust grows, more people recognise that, as the Financial Times says, ‘running a water utility – a natural monopoly selling a basic necessity to a captive market – ought not to be difficult. … The problem is that what are in in essence simple businesses become playgrounds for financial engineering.’ (FT, 1 July 2023) Why water should be commodified as a business at all is the larger question being increasingly asked.
There is a shocking disconnect between the glossy high-powered PR machinations of the likes of Macquarie and our day-to-day neighbourhood life, where we watch in horror the confluence of rising tides of filth in our seas and waves of the monumental greed of those responsible. As the crisis worsen civil disobedience, boycotts, lobbying and protests grow. These time-honoured and creative tactics are called for when mendacious corporations, governments and politicians cannot be trusted to protect the water on which all life depends.
About
Frankie Green lives in Whitstable and has been taking part in various political activities since the 1960s: anti-apartheid movement, the Vietnam war, the Gay Liberation Front, the Women’s Liberation Movement and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. She helps run a feminist music archive and collects stuff on a blog.
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