For facts’ sake!

Do you know how difficult it is to find the truth? It seems that for every fact, there’s another one that says the opposite. Even when a set of facts can be agreed upon, there’s probably 101 different interpretations and ensuing arguments that lead to 1,001 sundry conclusions.

As if that wasn’t infuriating enough, being presented with a limited selection of all available facts could sway a conclusion by a million miles either way. The Guardian is expert at such ‘economies with the truth’, but they’re not alone. Last month the Times reported that, “United Utilities, which serves northwest England, paid £296 million in dividends in the past year, the most paid by any water company.”

What they didn’t say was that UU didn’t pay a dividend the previous year because of the uncertainty surrounding Covid, and they wanted to shore up reserves just in case. As it happened, the worst-case scenario didn’t materialise, and this year they could afford to play catch-up. 

Other commentators object to the water companies paying dividends as a matter of principle. Ofwat (the industry regulator) explains, “Although the water and sewerage companies are largely monopoly service providers they must compete for capital with other companies. If they do not offer comparable returns to other companies, after taking into account relative risks, they will be unable to secure the capital they need to finance their investment programmes.” 

In other words, water companies have to pay competitive dividends. It’s an economic reality. A fact. Not liking that fact because of a preference for an alternative system is a different discussion.

Conscious that no matter how hard I try I’ll never be in full possession of all the facts, I try and fill in the gaps with logic, circumstantial evidence, common sense and seeing what others are saying. Regarding the latter, my go-to right-of-centre sources are CapX, Briefings for Britain and the Spectator (but not the Daily Mail as they’re for mischief and gossip). I don’t agree with everything these guys say – planning and the environment are a couple of examples where I digress from their habitual ‘nimby’ and ‘halt net-zero’ rhetoric. On the left there’s the BBC, Guardian and a chunk of my email inbox.

In addition to these obviously polarised opinions, I’ve tried for ages to find a neutral source, one that comes at an issue armed with no pre-determination, no ingrained bias, no alternative agenda. I’ve struggled. Often when I land on a website that claims to fit this bill, it takes me 90 seconds to find them to be closet lefties. Then I read the CVs of their contributors and executives, followed by a glance at their funders and supporters, and discover a plethora of ex-Guardian, BBC, New Statesmen writers, Labour-supporting advisers and trustees, and ‘social-change’ funders that confirms my initial impressions. 

I’ve tried The Conversation a couple of times. In July last year, they published a factual, non-judgmental history of Britain’s treatment of sewage. But last month, a different writer whose Twitter account evidences her love of left-wing policies and personalities, concluded that privatisation of the water industry had failed. She’d cherry-picked her facts, made sweeping statements, perpetuated nationalisation myths that a toddler could rebuff, and ignored the counterarguments.

I’ve also had a look at opendemocracy.net . They claim to be ‘pluralist’ saying, “We value diversity of perspective, culture and lived experience. We resist groupthink and we encourage debate. We are plural but not neutral: we call out injustice and oppression – but we listen to competing ideas about how to address them.”

Being pluralist, though, doesn’t negate the need for basic journalistic standards. One article last month about energy workers’ protests didn’t include a defence from the employers. I’m not claiming there was a valid defence but, especially when the writer is a member of the Scottish Green Party, to consider the other side’s comments would have been professional at least.

Even the Economist, which claims to occupy ‘the radical centre’, I find publishes too many individual articles that are biased one way or the other. The latest to irritate me was a rant against ‘nimbys’. It wasn’t even a well-written rant.

Thank goodness, the cavalry arrived. Twice. First in the form of carbonbrief.org . A UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, it specialises in data-driven articles about the science and policy response. Accepting that climate change is happening, it's mainly our fault and we have to act, like, yesterday, carbonbrief nevertheless includes different views in many of its articles as I mentioned in my climate change blog.

The second welcome discovery came in the form of a very useful fact-checking website that Google found for me when I was fuming at a LinkedIn post by vlogger (whatever that is) Peter Stefanovic, whose narcissistic mantra and mission states, “I simply will not stand by and allow lying in our politics to become normalised”. Obsessively contemptuous of Boris and all things right-of-centre, with a cult-following as sycophantic as that of Fearful Sharkey’s (who loves spouting uncontextualized soundbites that don’t stand up to scrutiny), Stefanovic is guilty of lying, just like the politicians he castigates. 

His LinkedIn post was a soundbite about Boris ‘stupidly’ advising people to spend £20 on a kettle to save £10 on their fuel bills. Actually, Boris gave this so-called kettle-advice during his speech about investing £700 million in a new nuclear plant, which may be expensive now, but in the longer term will help reduce costs. The kettle thing was a down-to-earth, accessible illustration, not tone-deaf advice as Stefanovic would have us believe.

So how did I chase down the truth? I googled something like “Boris kettle advice” and was directed to https://fullfact.org/news/Boris-Johnson-new-kettle/ that spilled the above beans. 

While on the site, I hopped around a few other fact-checked write-ups and found confirmation that Tory MPs didn’t vote last year to allow water companies to pump sewage into rivers as claimed by non-Tories, campaigners, and most media outlets. What the MPs did do was support Government proposals to progressively reduce sewage spills, and they voted against an amendment to the bill that wanted those spills eliminated altogether. The reason for the rejection of the amendment was that, at that time, the solutions for complete eradication hadn’t been costed and the Government didn’t want to commit the industry to a possibly unaffordable expense and an unachievable goal that would have undermined investor-confidence. Since then, estimates have suggested a requirement of about £660 billion to eliminate spills altogether (maybe). To put this into perspective, water companies have invested a total of about £160 billion in all aspects of their business over the past 30 years.

Fullfact.org also responded to claims in 2021 that Brexit had interrupted the supply of water treatment chemicals, which led to unavoidable increased dumping of untreated sewage. They accurately quoted the Environment Agency who said that companies might not [my emphases] be able to get the chemicals due to a number of reasons, including the pandemic, supply chain failure and “the UK’s new relationship with the EU.” In other words, Brexit might have been part of the problem re getting the chemicals, or it might not, and even if it were, the EA didn’t say to what extent. It needs more research, not politically expedient gap-filling.

If it’s one thing many campaigners love to bash more than the water companies, it’s Brexit. So for the above ‘scandal’, they had to decide whether to jump on the bash-Brexit bandwagon for supposedly causing the lack of chemicals, and therefore temper criticism of the water companies because it wasn’t their fault they had to dump more sewage, or trumpet increased spills of sewage and miss an opportunity to bash Brexit. This made me giggle.

So for future blogs, to supplement and modify the likes of CapX and the Guardian, my go-to unbiased sources will be carbonbrief and fullfact that so far I’ve found to be reliable, trustworthy and comforting.

Such nuggets really are a girl's best friend.