How the hell does a water company £21bn in debt, cash running out and still dumping sewage into rivers justify pulling a million quid from its emergency borrowing facility to pay the finance chief a signing on fee? Thames Water just did it for Steve Buck. Delayed 15 months. “Contractual.” Cash from the lenders fighting to stop nationalisation. Chairman admitted customers will call it unfair. Your bills are up. Your river is a toilet. They still look after their own. This isn’t a scandal. It’s the privatisation model working exactly as designed. Special Administration and public ownership under democratic control is the only adult answer left. Demand Burnham and Eagle stop playing games with the vultures and take it back. Now.

The Tories spent 14 years turning the police into a crime number call centre. They cut 20,000 officers. Chris Philp was Policing Minister while clear up rates cratered and low value thefts got written off. Now he and Kemi Badenoch demand mandatory facial recognition on every doorbell photo and officers knocking doors for every Find My iPhone ping. 10,000 extra cops after they gutted the force. Triple stop and search. “Take Back Our Streets.” This isn’t toughness. It’s the arsonists turning up with a hosepipe and a selfie stick. Crime has consequences. So does 14 years of austerity that starved the force and the communities. Fund prevention, rebuild trust, stop the theatre.

The rivers are still full of sewage. The bills are still rising. The decisions that shape daily life are still taken in rooms you will never enter. Tony Benn spent a lifetime naming that arrangement for what it is. Power without accountability. His five questions remain the cleanest instrument we have for cutting through the noise of 2026. What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? Ask them of the water company boards extracting dividends while pollution climbs and £22 billion of the next five years of bill increases is set to flow to private investors. Ask them of the energy companies posting record profits while fuel poverty hardens. Ask them of the appointed Lords and the donor networks that still set the boundaries of acceptable politics. The answers expose the same pattern he fought. Power concentrated, interests private, removal almost impossible. Privatisation was never a technical reform. It was a class project that moved the commanding heights of everyday life... water, energy, transport beyond democratic reach. The result is visible in every poisoned waterway and every impossible household budget. The green transition under the same ownership model simply becomes another extraction opportunity dressed in climate language. Benn’s industrial democracy offers the only alternative that joins environmental necessity to social justice. Workers and communities controlling the systems that keep us alive. A political class that leaves these structures intact has not yet answered the questions. Managerial caution and billionaire adjacent populism both fail the same test. Yet the public is already ahead. Majorities of 82% for water and 70% for energy already demand public ownership. Local campaigns against the pollution and the bills are growing. Workplaces still contain the knowledge of how the system actually runs. Benn never pretended democracy was a gift that stayed given. Every generation has to reclaim it. Relevance is not nostalgia. It is usefulness. The five questions are not a memorial. They are a toolkit. Use them. Put them to the powerful in public. Organise around the answers they refuse to give. Build the democratic control of energy and industry that makes a just transition possible. That is the unfinished business. And it is still ours to finish.