In his seminal 1962 book, The Image, Daniel Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” to describe events that were staged primarily to be covered by the media. Modern politics is rife with pseudo-events, and these are by no means confined to staged visits to factories and the like.

Labour’s announcement yesterday on the water industry is a textbook pseudo-event: most of what ministers revealed wasn’t new at all, but recycled plans first introduced by the previous Conservative government.

Feargal Sharkey, no Conservative apologist, has handily listed all those policies that Labour has simply re-announced. These include full sewage monitoring (2023) and the attendant outflow reduction plan (2022); the £104 billion of new investment (2023); phosphorus reductions (2022); and nature-based solutions (also 2022).

Two policies were in fact finalised in the run-up to last year’s general election: reinvesting company fines into local projects was announced that April, and Ofwat was prevented from announcing plans to ring-fence consumer bills for water infrastructure upgrades by the purdah period.

But there’s more. Ministers are boasting about jail sentences — yet the only offence that could actually lead to prison time is obstructing an investigation, something that’s been illegal since the Environment Act of 1996. Robbie Moore, the former water minister, also notes that the so-called “record number of criminal investigations” stems from the previous government’s decision to quadruple inspections. And Labour’s move to redefine the baseline for spill reductions? That means its proposals could actually permit more sewage spills than the Tories’ plans.

Even banning water companies from paying bonuses, which Sharkey suggests is the one (ill-thought-through) original proposal in Labour’s latest announcement, seems in fact to have been announced by the Conservatives in February 2024. As a result, yesterday’s announcements are, if anything, information-negative. They actually impede proper public understanding of government because voters who might have a hazy memory of the previous announcements might — entirely fairly — believe that these are new interventions, and they’re not.

But this pseudo-event is simply part and parcel of what we might describe as the Starmer government’s pseudo-radicalism. It is part of the same vein as those bold announcements about “renationalising the railways” which in fact referred merely to allowing franchise contracts to lapse.

An actually radical water agenda, from a Labour perspective, is obviously renationalisation. Unfortunately for the politicians, actual radicalism is difficult. Nationalising water would need either to be extremely expensive, at a time when the Government has no spare money, or expropriative, which would risk dangerously undermining the UK’s appeal to foreign investors.

Serious policymakers might also, if only in whispers, admit that there is scant evidence that nationalisation would actually fix anything. Heresy, perhaps, but true: even allowing for the gross regulatory failure which allowed Thames Water to freight itself with debt, privatisation has delivered investment in water infrastructure several times higher than it was under state ownership.

This has less to do with the virtues of the market and more to do with a simple structural fact: water revenues were ring-fenced and never siphoned off by the Treasury. Funding something through general taxation, by contrast, means forcing it to fight every year for scraps, competing with pensions, the NHS, and everything else. Just ask the courts or the military how that usually goes.

Yet this argument is complex and counter-intuitive to make, so politicians don’t make it. Instead we receive a steady diet of pseudo-events, all to disguise the fact that Labour’s policy programme, on water and much else, is about as real as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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