News that UK water bosses won’t get fat-cat bonuses for polluting waterways might mollify some, furious at the blatant mismanagement and grift. Britain is renowned for being cold, cloudy and wet, yet it’s now projected to run out of water by the mid-2030s, due to lack of reservoirs, and 1tn litres a year in leakage.

Water companies, some nearly bankrupt, push up charges and borrow huge sums not to fix leaks, but to service a £60bn debt mountain, as well as pay around £2bn a year in shareholder dividends.

There’s nothing efficient about capitalism. State or private, it’s always money first, people last. The whole planet needs democratic common ownership. Anything else is just a drop in the bucket.

An interim Water Commission report released on 3 June tells us that “the current system is not delivering what people expect and need” but “There is no simple, single change, no matter how radical, that will deliver the fundamental ‘reset’ of the water sector”

Alongside the blather about a ‘long-term direction’ and better regulation is a plea for the already low risk to investors to be made lower still, to make low returns more attractive to capital.

And there’s the rub – the Commission is (of course!) stuck with the capitalist mindset.

There is indeed a single radical change to make it easier to produce all of the goods and services that we all need – expropriate the capitalists.

In April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported an ‘unprecedented’ 9.4% rise in worldwide military spending last year, making 2024 the tenth year of successive increases. In response, SIPRI sponsored a “Forum on Peace and Development” in May, which featured “high-level panels and roundtables as well as a range of workshops, spotlights, exhibitions and fireside chats”.

Reassured? Don’t be.

Because capital, privately owned or state-controlled, will always require some part of the wealth that we workers produce to be squandered on preparations for and commission of fresh slaughters. Not for freedom, democracy or nationhood, but to protect markets, sources of raw materials and trade routes.

So if you want world peace, you need to help prepare for world socialism

Many Labour Party supporters are disappointed and dispirited at the way its government is managing the system. They didn’t expect benefit cuts, ramped up anti-migrant measures and promises of no tax increases for the wealthy. As usual, any principles Labour professes when out of office go out the window once they win power and are faced with the need to keep the anarchic system of capitalism afloat.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Trying to run a system based on trade, wages, profit, and the unpredictable market is bound to leave you flailing. It needs to be replaced by a moneyless, frontierless society of free access – socialism. But the Labour Party never has been and never can be an instrument for that.