AS I write this, I have just watched residents of the village of Brixham in Devon speaking angrily about locals having been infected by the parasite cryptosporidiosis via their tap water.

The supplier, South-West Water (SWW), paid two of its executives more than £1 million in salary and bonuses in 2023. In 2022, its parent company Pennon paid a special dividend of £1.5 billion to shareholders.

Days earlier, I watched with horror the BBC reports that millions of litres of untreated sewage had been illegally pumped into the beautiful Lake Windermere, a place many of us have visited.

BBC Cumbria reported that the firm responsible, United Utilities, did not stop untreated sewage from being pumped into the lake for 10 hours after a fault in February. The next day, it paid out £340m to investors and we read that its chief executive gets a salary of £690,000 and a bonus of up to £900,000.

Only, two weeks ago, I read about a farmer in Swaledale in North Yorkshire who was justifiably angry after contaminated floodwater killed 30 of his sheep in January. Yorkshire Water’s boss is in the same league as those in SWW, though didn’t take her £800,000 bonus last year due to “public anger over sewage in rivers”.

I could write forever of the spate of horror stories surfacing in England’s privatised water system but will let you off with just one more.

I’m sure you all reacted with shock when you heard a member of the Oxford’s Boat Race team in March say their defeat was, in part, due to sickness caused by, as he put it, “poo in the water”. E. coli bacteria had been found in the Thames before the race, yet the Cambridge cox was ceremonially chucked in the river after victory.

Thames Water is in crisis and is seeking a massive UK Government bailout (deeply ironic in the context of a boat race). It typically pays its chief executives £750,000 per year plus bonuses, and “golden hellos” in the millions.

Surely the incoming Labour government will save the good folk of England from diarrhoea and poo in the water? Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed last year that nationalising water companies was “no longer on the agenda”. Party leader Keir Starmer is saying nothing, again.

Scotland, too, can have problems with water. Sometimes flood drains overflow when rainfall is too heavy for them to cope, and untreated sewage does end up in rivers and the sea. Not all overflows are monitored.

However, try searching for evidence of poisoning from Scotland’s water supplies and you will find only “potentially toxic forever chemicals”, traces of human medicines such as ibuprofen, an “oily taste” in the water of Uist and Benbecula last year, and one case, still unresolved, from 2009 of cattle poisoning in Stornoway.

How is this possible? Scottish Water has always been under state control. It pays moderate salaries and bonuses and no shareholder dividends. According to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) in 2024, some 98% of Scotland’s bathing waters are safe to swim in and 99% of drinking water samples pass all tests.

Scottish Water, however, cannot take all of the credit for the Sepa classification of beaches as safe for bathing. Across the country, teams of volunteers have been working hard clearing often dangerous refuse to make this possible.

Across Central Ayrshire, local volunteers – the Irvine Clean Up Crew, Friends of Troon Beaches, Prestwick Litter Pickers, and the Tarbolton Clean Up Crew – all make a difference to our environment.

My own experience working on my local beach at Barassie, near Troon in Ayrshire, with a wonderful team of volunteers, helped this popular beach to be reclassified in May 2022 as bathing water.

Our work was formally recognised by the Scottish Parliament with a level of all-party support that would warm the cockles of your heart. (Any Barassie cockles are, of course, now safe to eat. I recommend them in a Thai-style shellfish and coconut broth.) The SNP will always keep Scottish Water nationalised because we are keeping the family silver in Scotland, not selling it off.