Imagine waking on a sweltering summer morning, the tap spluttering before delivering a lukewarm trickle, and the garden already wilting under a sky that has forgotten how to cry. That is the reality for more than 26 million people across England and Wales who now face hosepipe bans during one of the most severe droughts the country has ever experienced. It was the driest July since the Met Office began keeping records 190 years ago. Some places went more than 50 days with almost no rainfall. The parched ground has cracked across two-thirds of England and the whole of Wales, and a succession of water companies — Affinity, Anglian, Cambridge, Essex and Suffolk, Southern, South East, South West, Thames, and Welsh Water among them — have all introduced restrictions. This is not some distant shadow, but a close, messy, inconvenient blow to ordinary life. It can mean no washing the car, no filling the paddling pool, no watering the tomatoes on a hot evening, no quiet ritual of watching a fire with a jet of water. There is a strange, raw intimacy to a hosepipe ban—it creeps into the ordinary corners of our daily routines and leaves people frustrated, anxious and, sometimes, looking for someone to blame.
And Reform UK has offered a very simple culprit. In a new policy paper, the party claims mass immigration is the true reason Britain is running out of water. The thinking goes like this: under Conservative promises over fourteen years, the country has imported entire dozen million people, and that huge wave of new arrivals has placed unimaginable pressure on the country’s water pipes, treatment works, reservoirs and local services. “A prosperous country should not have to turn the taps off in the summer,” the paper says. To be sure, the party’s two biggest idea is a detection through “abundance” — to dismantle the current Government’s target of reducing public water-supply use in England by a fifth by 2038. Why, and the size of daily use per person, should be a fairly innocent priority? Reform says we should build “as many reservoirs as it takes” and it would make enormous new reservoirs easier to fast-track by lowering the threshold for them to be treated as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. The headline is unmistakable: the drought isn’t a problem of climate or infrastructure in the past, it’s a problem, they claim, of the many new mouths being welcomed into the country.
This is a designed to be deliberately provocative, and it works, but it is worth dipping beneath that. Turn to the basic plumbing of this argument and you quickly run into old British underground pipes, crumbling sewers, and supply systems largely the same shape as Victorian. While immigration may increase the number of people pouring with a newly filled kettle, it doesn’t create the burden of a single leaky main. Everyone who has seen a long, tinny stain on a road in July has seen the truth about the water company’s situation. There are nine reservoir projects around England that have, for years, been bogged down in planning. Last year, the Government designated two of them as nationally significant infrastructure to speed them forward, but that’s a lot faster. Yesterday, Defrawe something new: it announced measures to make it easier for farmers to build reservoirs on their own land. All of that is real and useful, but it is more lost than immigration. Water isn’t just being ladled out by new arrivals, it’s being lost because a reservoir hasn’t been taken serious for decades; because the leaks were allowed to leak; because a climate-changing lasts longer spent longer and harder each year. The temptation to place the drought onto visas and trains is a beautifully simple distraction from the much more uncomfortable truth of water governance: nobody has actually been thinking long-term enough, or investing the proper sums, to sustain a warming, reaching, island.
Reform’s politics, of course, are not just about water. The party sees a kind of romantic, axe-to-the-system a reclamation of old certainties. Its deputy leader, Richard Tice, has loudly decried the global target of net zero as “net stupid zero”, and that message rings with deep devotion from the party’s parts. It wants to scrap its official climate targets and instead ramp up fossil fuels. Tice has insisted that the human activity heating the globe is “absolute garbage,” and described any connection between man-made CO2 and climate change as being without evidence. Along with his signature on the tipping point and has encouraged investors to stay away from renewables. The problem with this is not only that human sciences necessarily is absolutely virtual. The scientists have known for over a century—through ice cores, temperature records, ocean data, and satellite measurements—that burning coal and gas is crucially responsible for a rapid warming of the planet. It’s a view that is now more than a settled scientific fact; it is a general understanding allowed by every major scientific academy on Earth. When sky lowers over a reservoir bare hillsides, when late summer storms are not held in moisture but dry heat, the line between climate science and ordinary life is not abstract. Sprinklers are banned because the climate is warm and the river less flows. The party, by denying and rejecting costly climate action at exactly the same time as the drought unfolds, running into a river with a hole in the bottom of the kettle.
Still, the immigration link deserves a closer look, because it is not just ethically dubious but demonstrably thin. It’s true that an increasing population increases demand for many things, and water is among them. A growing society offers the many choices—more homes, more crops, more bedding—and England is a crowded country. At the same time, we must be careful not to make a policy to confuse a minority, targeting the immigrants themselves who are among the most likely to be found in the dead-end jobs that keep the country alive—packing food, delivering care, and building the pipes and bricks of Britain’s infrastructure. The truth is that water scarcity isn’t something that can be resolved by simply asking a particular group to leave. It is a shared challenge that follows from a whole system: our farming habits, the number of baths we take, the design of that highway’s concrete, the vanished enthusiasm for building big reservoirs. And in a rather obvious counterargument, the water found in England isn’t actually missing; it’s just not managed well. The Environment Agency and different independent reviews point to years of under-investment and fragmentation, not waves of. to blame. No serious water engineer could look at the entire stretch of last heat and immersive of water shortage as a population puzzle. Political slogans, on the other hand, can sweep away the soil of all that in one suspension of mathematics. A flammable intersection in the parched, dry grass: when houses run out of water you can find a crowd to blame more easily than a leaky pipe.
At the end of the day, though, it’s not about which party can point fingers more sharply, it’s about whether people can feel safe and cared for in their own homes. Water is one of those things we rarely think about until it isn’t there — and then it becomes everything: the glass for the baby’s formula, a cool bath in a heatwave, a hot garden to comb in the summer days that seem to be coming more often. The last few weeks have shown the two pieces of what a future in England could look like, but it isn’t certain it will. One is building enough reservoirs, fixing the leaks, and, above all, taking climate change seriously — the kind of difficult but boring work that doesn’t make many speeches. The other is to stir up the question by turning the water that is being delivered into something that is scarce, to believe that a millions of people can be told that the same waters are more theirs than anyone else’s. Because if a nation of 26 million can be told to save every drop, the real issue doesn’t stop. The next heat wave will come. The next bans will. And it won’t be based on who has a better claim to the sky, but what we do with it. We will have to find a way through the coming heat, but not only how to share the water — but also how to share the truth.
