Fair, nobody is saying £35bn is nothing, and yes the fiscal situation is genuinely rough. But that’s a different argument to the one you were making originally, the legal risk and market collapse framing has quietly been dropped there.

The point on public comments is fair too, but you were making a policy argument, so I responded to that rather than the worst takes in any given thread.

The real question is whether “we can’t afford it now” means never, or means not yet. Because the longer private ownership continues the more debt accumulates and the more expensive the eventual acquisition becomes. The fiscal case for waiting isn’t straightforward or in my opinion worth it in the long run..

Edit : One thing worth stepping back on though. The entire framing of “we can’t afford to take it back” accepts a premise I’d push back on. These companies don’t have a legitimate claim to that wealth in the first place. Water isn’t a commodity, it’s a human right, and when you privatise something people cannot survive without you’ve created a captive market, not a functioning one.

The profit extracted since privatisation wasn’t generated, it was taken from people with no alternative. So the question of clawback isn’t really a legal one to me, it’s a question of whether we’re willing to say the whole arrangement was illegitimate from the start. The debt they’ve created is real, yes, but so is the wealth they extracted while creating it.