Councillor Martin Abrams left Labour for the Green Party over a key issue: the ‘catastrophic failure’ of Thames Water
I was a Labour Party member for almost 20 years but a few months ago I resigned my membership and joined the Greens. I didn’t leave the Labour Party lightly. For years, I pounded the streets under successive Labour Party leaders, knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, as a CLP Officer and then a local Councillor because I believed Labour, despite its many flaws, was still the best vehicle for change.
But under Keir Starmer’s duplicitous leadership, culminating in dozens of broken promises my commitment to Labour broke but this had been brewing for a while, like the slow trickle of pollution that finally becomes a flood.
The truth is, I could no longer look my residents in the eye while the party I served failed to stand up for the basics of honest governance, real accountability and policies that serve the people not big business.
And nothing symbolises that failure more clearly than the catastrophic failure of Thames Water and this Labour Government and all the Governments before them to fix our terminally broken privatised water industry.
The sewage story we can’t wash away
Across London and the South East, we’ve seen a slow-motion scandal unfold. Thames Water — drowning in debt, leaking sewage into our rivers, and still paying out huge sums in shareholder dividends and executive bonuses — has become the poster child for what happens when public services are treated like profit machines.
And over the last few months I’ve had dozens of emails from local residents in my ward terrified about the massive Thames Water bill increases and how with a continuing cost of living crisis they will be able to afford increases of 50% and more.
One resident told me her Thames Water bill had more than doubled increasing from £27 per month to more than £80 per month. Another resident is now paying over £200 per month…for water. Inexplicable and unjustifiable.
When residents asked me what the council or the Government were doing about it, I wanted to tell them there was a plan. I wanted to say Labour would fix it. But the truth is, the response from Westminster — even under a Labour government and our local Streatham MP Steve Reed who was Environment Secretary until recently — has been shockingly bad.
Yes, ministers talk about “tougher regulation” and “independent oversight.” But what people see on the ground is sewage still being dumped, bills still going up, and shareholders still getting paid. And that’s why so many of my former colleagues — good, principled councillors — are making the same choice I did.
The clear case for public ownership
I joined Labour because I believed in public ownership — that water, energy, and transport should serve the public good, not private balance sheets. But now, when the case for public ownership couldn’t be clearer, Labour’s leadership seems paralysed by the ghosts of the 1990s.
Thames Water is effectively bankrupt. Its debt mountain — much of it accrued through financial trickery rather than investment — has left it unable to deliver the infrastructure we desperately need.
Yet instead of taking it back into public hands, the Government is scrambling to reassure investors and talk about “special administration.”
That’s not reform. That’s fear. That’s cowardliness.
Meanwhile, the Green Party has been the only voice consistently calling for full public ownership of water, alongside local democratic oversight. Greens aren’t afraid to say what so many people already believe: that clean water shouldn’t be a privilege, and pollution shouldn’t be profitable.
The local picture: when rivers run brown, politics turns green
In councils across London and the South East — from Lewisham to Lambeth, Hammersmith & Fulham to Thanet — Labour councillors are crossing the floor. Some of us were driven out by disillusionment; others were pulled by hope. But all of us share one thing in common: we couldn’t defend a party that no longer listens to its members or the people it claims to represent.
But let’s be honest, my residents don’t care about internal Labour party manoeuvring. They care about the cost of their bills and a broken system that has failed to invest, a broken system that is constantly patching up leaking pipes and digging up roads causing disruption and delays, a broken system that can only exist if it is allowed to routinely dump sewage.
The Labour Party promised an end to ‘sticking plaster politics’, yet Thames Water and the rest of privatised water industry is the living embodiment of sticking plaster politics.
The Green Party, for all its smaller size, is speaking to that frustration with moral
clarity. We’re saying what Labour used to say: that essential services should belong
to the people who use them, not to anonymous investors.
What real leadership would look like – public ownership of water for people
not profit
Real leadership on water means facing down the vested interests not accepting gifts and hospitality. It means facing the reality that our water should never have been privatised and that privatised companies like Thames Water simply can’t meet their obligations. Thames Water should be taken into public ownership — not as a bailout, but as a reset.
And it means being honest: something Keir Starmer and Steve Reed have categorically failed to do. The climate crisis is making our infrastructure more fragile. We can’t tackle that with market tinkering or timid regulatory reforms. We need a vision rooted in public ownership for the public good, environmental repair, and democratic accountability and I am proud to now be in a party fighting for those aims.
Councillor Martin Abrams is now a Green Party councillor for Streatham St Leonard’s ward in Lambeth.
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