Today, we are already in the midst of a deep and deepening crisis of water availability. Though more than 70% of the world’s surface is covered by the stuff, almost all of it is seawater. In fact, on average, only around one in every 10,000 drops is accessible freshwater that humans can easily use. Demand for it has surged as global populations have grown, diets have changed and cities have expanded into arid regions from Riyadh to Mexico City.

With cities expanding faster than the water systems that sustain them, what was once a mere constraint has become a defining crisis of the 21st century. At the same time, the ways we live have depleted water sources or made them unusable — either because of pollution, because groundwater is being extracted faster than it is being replaced, because rivers are being dammed and diverted, or because natural buffers like wetlands are being reclaimed for other uses.

In 2023, the UN World Water Development Report warned that humanity’s relationship with water had become dangerously extractive, describing modern water use as “vampiric” and noting that around 3.5 billion people already experience severe water stress for at least one month every year. The problem has only become worse since the UN study was written.

A major report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health published last month put it bluntly: we have now entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” in which societies are living beyond their hydrological means. Today, it notes, nearly three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries that are water-insecure or critically water-insecure; around 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water; groundwater depletion and land subsidence are already irreversible in many regions; and shrinking lakes, rivers and glaciers mean future supplies will become more scarce even if demand stabilizes.

Over the past 18 months, there has been much talk about how rare earths will rule our century.  Yet with half of the world’s 100 largest cities located in areas of high water stress, and many inhabitants seemingly oblivious to the risks, urban planners and policymakers are increasingly talking about “day zero”: the moment our taps run dry. The consequences could yet define our age — arguably far more than neodymium or cerium ever will.

Already, the signs are ominous. In 2017, for instance, Cape Town came within a hair’s breadth of becoming unviable, with city officials poised to shut down water infrastructure and tell inhabitants to gather rations from distribution points. Other major cities — as far afield as São Paulo and Istanbul — have struggled too, with some reaching genuine crisis. In June 2019, for instance, all four of the city’s main reservoirs in Chennai ran dry, forcing the Indian city’s 11 million residents to queue to wait for a small allocation of water brought in by trucks. In December, meanwhile, Tehran’s supplies came perilously close to exhaustion; Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, even talked of having to evacuate the capital.

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Why China will beat the West

By Wessie du Toit

It is not just far-off places that are at risk here. Strikingly, a host of cities in well-resourced countries are also finding themselves under pressure  — including Los Angeles, New York, London. The case of the UK is instructive. Last May, Steve Reed, then the environment secretary, warned that “rapid population growth, crumbling infrastructure that has been left to decline, and a warming climate mean the UK could run out of clean drinking water by the middle of the next decade without a major infrastructure overhaul”. Such concerns are not new. As far back as 2010, almost a fifth of the territory of the European Union, and more than 10% of its population, were already exposed to water scarcity.

How, then, have we got to a position where global freshwater demand is expected to outstrip demand by 40% not in some abstract future — but in just four years time, by the end of this decade?

There are multiple overlapping factors at play here. The most obvious is demographic. The global population has more than doubled since 1970, meaning there are billions of new consumers of water for drinking, sanitation, food and energy. Patterns of consumption have also changed. For instance, data centers require vast volumes of freshwater to cool their servers. That figure already stands at roughly 560 billion liters a year, and, as cloud and AI workloads expand, could double by 2030. Just one facility gobbles up millions of liters of water a day, the equivalent to the annual household needs of tens of thousands of people.

It is hardly surprising, then, that engineers and policymakers have begun to explore radical alternatives — from relocating data centers to cold climates, to offshore platforms, or even to space, where cooling could be achieved without competing for scarce resources on Earth. The problem, though, is that for every step forward, humanity takes two back.

After all, massive man-made interventions in water systems mean that resources have been reallocated, redistributed and diverted, transforming ecosystems in potentially dangerous ways. China has built, on average, at least one large dam every day since 1949, and indeed now has more large dams than the rest of the world combined. But these dams can cause issues all their own. While they provide hydropower and irrigation, they also trap sediment, alter river flows and reduce downstream water availability, often exacerbating shortages for farmers and cities far downstream.

Alongside this, the past three decades have seen the fastest and greatest urbanization in history. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, with many expanding into regions that were never hydrologically suited to support large populations. Urban growth concentrates demand, often far from reliable surface water, leading cities to rely heavily on groundwater. That is not helped by inefficiency: in the UK, for example, an estimated three billion liters of water are lost every day because of leaks and decades of under-investment in pipes and treatment systems. Pricing too often fails to reflect scarcity, while governance struggles to keep pace with growth or adequately regulate water companies. The result is widespread inefficiency and uncontrolled extraction, with water treated as an inexhaustible input rather than a finite asset.

Indeed, the scale of groundwater extraction has reached levels that are reshaping the planet itself. Scientists have shown that so much water has been pumped from the Indo-Gangetic plains in northern India that the redistribution of mass has measurably shifted the Earth’s rotational axis, contributing to the movement of the geographic poles by several centimeters per year — something that has an impact on GPS accuracy, satellite navigation, and the precise measurement of time and space on which modern technology depends.

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The elitism of the river Thames

By Wessie du Toit

One small comfort, at least, is that such upheavals — in principle if not scale — only fit the pattern of history. One of the earliest recorded wars, fought more than 4,500 years ago between a pair of Mesopotamian city states, was triggered by disputes over irrigation canals and access to river water in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates. Stone inscriptions describe the destruction of dikes and canals as acts of aggression. From the very beginning of recorded civilization, then, control of water meant power, prosperity and survival: and denying it to others was a means of coercion.

Combined with those bubbling demographic and technological pressures, it’s unsurprising that this ancient pattern has only accelerated. Since 2022, incidences of water-related violence have almost doubled worldwide. These incidents range from attacks on pipelines and dams to protests that turn violent when communities lose access to drinking water or irrigation. In central Nigeria, for instance, clashes between farmers and pastoralists, driven in part by shrinking rivers and degraded grazing land, have killed thousands over the past decade, with entire villages burned and populations displaced. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 unleashed catastrophic flooding downstream, cut off drinking water to large parts of the south of the country, and demonstrated how water infrastructure itself has become a direct weapon of war.

Looking ahead, several flashpoints stand out. The Indus basin is among the most dangerous. Under the Indus Water Treaty, India and Pakistan share one of the world’s most complex water systems. Signed in 1960, and often cited as a rare success of Cold War diplomacy, it was among the earliest major transboundary water treaties registered with the United Nations. Yet now, rising demand, glacier retreat in the Himalayas and infrastructure development upstream have all put the treaty under strain, with water increasingly framed in nationalist terms on both sides of the border. “I would like to tell the younger generation how this country was ruined,” as Narendra Modi put it in May 2025, adding that reading the Water Treaty today would leave Indians shocked. Combined with similar sabre-rattling from Pakistan, and things could easily escalate — with consequences that could easily transcend the Himalayas.

There’s scope for diplomatic blunders elsewhere, not least in northeast Africa, where Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam is reshaping power dynamics along the Nile. While Addis Ababa has viewed this enormous project as essential for development and energy security, Egypt has long feared existential threats to its water supply: over 90% of its freshwater comes from the river. Despite years of negotiations, no comprehensive agreement has been reached, leaving water as a persistent source of diplomatic and potentially military tension.

In the autumn of 2025, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty warned the UN Security Council of Ethiopia’s “unilateral actions” and affirmed that Egypt “will not allow its water rights to be compromised and will take all measures guaranteed by international law and the UN Charter to defend the existential interests of its people”. Such statements are not just warnings — but implicit threats of armed conflict.

And if that again hints at how human foibles can mix with water politics to worrying effect, Western countries aren’t immune either. One might look, here, at water agreements between the United States and Mexico over the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, and which are being tested by prolonged drought, shrinking reservoirs and competing demands from agriculture, cities and natural ecosystems. Especially in the age of Donald Trump, where coercion is an increasingly popular tool for settling disputes, it isn’t hard to see how treaties signed way back in 1944 are either deemed void — or else renegotiated to American benefit and Mexico’s loss.

Another complicating factor is the way global climate patterns are shifting, unevenly and unpredictably. Some areas are experiencing far wetter conditions than historical norms, while others are becoming markedly drier. The problem is not simply scarcity, but volatility. Rain increasingly arrives in the wrong places, at the wrong times and in the wrong quantities. Long-standing assumptions about seasonality — when rains come, how long they last, how rivers respond — are breaking down.

These swings matter because infrastructure, governance and social systems are built for averages, not extremes. Pipes, reservoirs, canals and drainage networks were designed for a climate that no longer exists. To return to India, having effectively run out of water in 2019, Chennai upgraded its reservoir systems — only to be hit two years later not by drought, but by devastating floods.

The good news is that many of the technical tools to address water stress already exist. Desalination has expanded rapidly, particularly through advances in reverse osmosis that dramatically reduce costs and energy use. Wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, smart metering and leak detection can stretch existing supplies much further. Artificial intelligence and advanced modeling offer the possibility of optimizing distribution, forecasting shortages earlier, and managing systems dynamically rather than reactively.

Yet technology alone is not enough. Today’s world is also one of predation, in which vulnerabilities are increasingly easy to identify and exploit. Water infrastructure can be sabotaged, politicized, weaponized — as has happened in Gaza and Ukraine. Data systems can be manipulated. Dependence on single sources or cross-border flows can be turned into leverage. All the while, global governance looks fragile. International cooperation is strained as the world order buckles and cross-border solutions, essential for rivers, aquifers and shared basins, appear increasingly precarious.

Some may still hope that markets or innovation will quietly resolve the problem, and extraterrestrial data centers may yet do something to help. But water does not behave like other commodities. It is local, finite, and political: unlike rare earths or hydrocarbons, water cannot be stockpiled at scale, substituted or shipped across oceans to smooth out shortages; it must be consumed where it falls or flows. So when water is scarce, there is no global market to arbitrate supply — only hard decisions, made locally, about who goes without. In a century defined by ecological pressure, then, water sits near the top of the hierarchy of risks. This is not because it is unsolvable, but because it is foundational.

But all these arguments have now been decisively won, so swiftly and totally that it is apparently difficult for liberals to remember that they ever held different views, let alone denounced the ones they now profess.

Yet while the world has moved beyond economic liberalism, leftover liberals still run the West. Like a post-Communist state where the old nomenklatura, having hurriedly adopted the mantle of liberal capitalists, still run the show, a great, historic revolution has occurred but the same people remain in charge, having suffered no retribution for the catastrophic mistakes their failed idealism brought in tow. A massive clear-out is long overdue: and no more absurd an illustration can be found of the immovable fatberg blocking our political future, the sheer ideological inertia preventing reform, than Britain’s failing water companies.

The failed status quo our politicians contort themselves to defend, like some ancient pillar of our constitution, was itself a bold act of political change. Thatcher’s privatisation of the national water supply was a course of action so daringly radical, so intuitively wrongheaded that only one other nation on earth, Pinochet’s Chile, took the same path. As in so many other aspects of national life, Britain carried out a reckless experiment on itself which failed. Like so much else of Westminster’s tinkering with a country which in retrospect seems to have functioned perfectly well, the failure was so disastrous that the error cannot be admitted, let alone rectified.

The results fulfilled none of the stated aims of privatisation: competition among providers did not lower costs or improve services, as instead the spoils were portioned out among regional monopolies; no new infrastructure was built, as profits were extracted as dividends, with crippling new debt added on top; precious national resources, whether the public’s wealth or Britain’s famously over-abundant supply of water, were squandered. Yet if the water supply systems of every other country in the world provide insufficient comparison, we possess a control group within our own borders, studiously ignored by London commentators. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, water remained under state control: bills are lower (in Northern Ireland, non-existent for domestic users), infrastructure is not notably worse, and taxpayers have not been saddled with extravagant debt purely to pay out dividends.

In this sense, the oft-made liberal claim that Britain urgently needs to decolonise itself may be correct, though not in the way its adherents think. Exploiting a country’s resources and extracting the wealth of its people solely for the purpose of enriching foreign shareholders is how you run an unloved colony, not a nation. It is striking that it is only England, the submerged nation where Westminster’s writ runs unchallenged, with no viable nationalist independence movement to force the central government to keep voters relatively happy, that has been forced to submit itself to looting by the water companies. That it is Thames Water, whose turbid assets flow past the Palace of Westminster itself, which appears closest to collapse is surely no accident: it is the richest portion of the colony that was latched onto first and most tightly, and was thus the first to be sucked dry. In Britain, just as all distances are measured from Charing Cross, dysfunction radiates out from the centre. The aim of any form of radical politics must surely be, while preserving the Union, to find a way to liberate Britain from Westminster, and from the reliably servile comprador class that scurries along its endless corridors, looking for unguarded family silver to sell.

After all, no voter would actively choose the economic model we have. But as Thames Water’s looming collapse reminds us, we are not governed according to our political desires, instead we are ruled through absolute and open disregard for the popular will. As a recent YouGov poll shows, 69% of the British public, including 66% of Conservative voters, believe the water supply should be run as a public utility, while just 8% believe that things should remain as they are. Like renationalising the railways, a policy which 67% support, bringing water back into public ownership would be wildly popular, yet is viewed with as much distaste by our ruling caste as public hanging (which would, it must be said, also be fairly popular). Yet as the urgent attempt to find some last-ditch alternative to renationalisation shows, both parties still cower in fear from granting the electorate its desires. Viewed objectively, the function of Westminster politicians is not to deliver the policies that voters want, but to frustrate them. A Britain that reflected the majority politics, both Right and Left, of its people, would be a very different and far more liveable country: this should be the postliberal horizon.

Even as British postliberals flirt with a poorly-defined national conservatism, it is the Labour Left pushing tangible improvements to the common good, even if its experimental progressivism makes it an enemy in the cultural sphere. If the Conservatives are unable to conserve anything of value, Labour may at least, through recalibrating the nation’s economy around the now-atrophied power of the state, achieve conservative ends. Family life would be better served by increasing pay, by building houses, and by widening access to childcare than by mocking the latest progressive culture war innovation on Twitter. On home ownership, fearful of the state they were elected to manage, conservative intellectuals provide timid, stuttering suggestions, tinkering at the edges of policy: what if we built nicer-looking houses, or devised a complicated system of street votes so local planning committees wouldn’t object to new development? Instead, Labour proposes to cut this self-imposed Gordian knot through the simple expedient of the state buying land cheaply, relaxing planning restrictions and building houses, just as a Conservative party that knew how to win elections used to do.

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Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

Effectively a conservative variant of socialism, postliberalism has always struggled to reconcile the two halves of its worldview: the post-industrial working class is, in truth, significantly less socially conservative than the tweedy intellectuals professing to speak for them. Equally, the Left’s suspicion that postliberals will always be distracted from pursuing the economics of the common good by shallow nods at social conservatism is often more accurate than we would prefer to think. Yet by fundamentally rejecting the narrow parameters of the liberal worldview, it is afforded a welcome degree of detachment from the rounds of partisan politics: with no particular loyalty to either viable party, postliberals can flit between whichever promises to implement the greater part of its ideal programme. Yet while its synthesis of economic radicalism and social conservatism may double the chance of at least some of its demands being implemented by one of the two Westminster factions, it also offers twice the opportunity for disappointment.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

A few years ago, I declared that the Conservative party represented the best hope for postliberal governance: back in 2021, it really did seem that “the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged”, a party “already making postliberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial North”, so that “whether we like it or not, postliberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did 40 years ago”. As events proved, I was profoundly mistaken.

Since 2019, postliberal intellectuals have been given to loudly claiming that it is easier for the Right to move Left on economics than for the Left to move Right on culture: but the Conservative party’s public suicide has dramatically revealed the flaw at the heart of this analysis. Just because a particular course of action is the easiest to follow, the one that will be most warmly rewarded by voters, does not mean that our politicians will do it, even in our notional democracy. Through its destructive decades-long love affair with economic liberalism, the Conservative party entirely burned through the foundations of conservatism, rooting up its future voting base like noxious weeds. Sometimes the dead hand of ideology is just too strong, strangling even the most basic instinct for self-preservation as it pulls a party, and a nation into the grave.

The Conservative party can be safely written off for now as a spent force: the current overriding danger is that Labour will fail in turn, and for the same reasons: its leadership also still in thrall to the same dead ideology and the tiny minority of voters who still adhere to it. If anything can rival the uselessness of a Conservative party that conserves nothing, it is a Labour party too timid on the economy to save Britain from its downward, perhaps terminal spiral.

A Labour party already watering down its most ambitious economic pledges serves no purpose at all: the party’s sole appeal is its willingness to harness the power of the state to productive ends. Labour’s cautious retreat from offering free childcare, its delicate dance to avoid renationalising rail and energy at the time of greatest political opportunity in decades does not bode well for Starmer’s prospects as a bold reformer. Who is he trying to win over? When even the Times, the nation’s arbiter of boring status quo centrism, can run leaders lambasting the failure of privatised water, when, even the Reform party can offer a more convincing path towards renationalisation than Labour, something is going terribly wrong with Starmer’s vision. The political stars have aligned, the nation is in agreement: for him to squander this opportunity casts doubt on Starmer’s fitness for leadership, and on the idea of Labour providing a meaningful alternative to Tory dysfunction at all. As Labour’s exiled king Jeremy Corbyn observes with all the piercing clarity of the simple-minded, “It’s really not that complicated: stop bailing out private companies and bring our water into public ownership instead.”

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Boris Johnson should destroy the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed, through bringing about the wave of renationalisation voters from both parties desire, a Corbyn government in 2019 would perhaps have achieved a greater postliberal synthesis than the futile Johnson show delivered. A Corbyn government that invested in state capacity a whole parliament ago may perhaps have arrested the decline sooner, and stolen a march on the new world economic consensus. Through ramping up state direction of the economy to compete in a world whose economic order has been reshaped by China, and by the looming need to replace fossil fuels and the infrastructure grid underwriting modern life which depends on them, the rest of the world is already moving towards something approaching war economies: only Britain remains the last holdout, the unchanging hermit kingdom of extractive, borderless neoliberalism.

No other developed country would permit its wealth and resources to be looted by foreign investors, or its utilities to be run by foreign states. Britain’s future is not bright: as the global situation deteriorates, the decisions made in the next few parliaments may be all that staves off collapse. Like Chekhov’s gun, in Britain the power of the state is an unused weapon waiting to be wielded: the only question is who will seize it first, and to what ends. With the Conservatives eliminated as an option by their own record of governance, it is the decisions made now by Labour that will determine the nation’s course in the decades to come.

We might wish Labour were led by someone bolder, but for now Starmer is there all there is: his stance on how to handle Thames Water is thus the first great test of our inevitable government-in-waiting. The pressure from the Labour Left to commit the party to renationalising water should therefore be actively supported by those of our political tribe: not only is it desirable in itself, and supported by the vast majority of voters, but it will finally mark the symbolic death of Britain’s old, failed order. And if Labour should fail too, following the Conservatives into political oblivion, at least then may come the time of real politics. Like the shifting establishment stance towards globalisation, when the change comes, it will be swift and total: in the coming waves of crisis lie political opportunities just waiting to be seized.