The trade in water services – how does GATS apply to the water and sanitation services sector?

Abstract

In the 1930s, the French Minister for Finance, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, visited England to consult with his counterpart there. Reading The Times, to his bemusement, he noticed that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had written to the Editor to say that he had found on his lawn on the previous day a particular type of water-wagtail, that the time was unusually early for that species, and that he was sure he was not mistaken. M. Flandin thought such a letter unimaginable in France, but soon came to appreciate that, in England, there was a prevailing ethos that to be nothing but a politician, or a specialist, and nothing more, renders a person stale, or sour, at least something rather less than a complete human being.Federigo di Montefeltro, the first Duke of Urbino in the mid-15 th century, a very great soldier and ruler, thought the same. The portrait of the Duke -either by Pedro Berruguete or Justus van Gent -depicts him in full armour, in all his chivalric glory. His helmet, however, lay at his feet. He is seated in his library, reading from the precious antique manuscripts he assiduously collected. For he was rather more than merely a great general. He was a highly cultivated and intelligent man, who, for pleasure, read the great works of antique literature, regarding the pursuit of the studia humanitatis as an attribute of any great man in any profession. The Duke's humanity was his biographer's recurring theme. 'What are the essential attributes to being a good ruler?', he asked the Duke. 'Essere umano', the Duke replied, 'to be human'; by which we would mean to be humane, to have within you that quality the Greeks referred to as 'to philanthropon' (; that is, that deep love and reverence for the human person.These historical anecdotes commend to our graduates the cultivation of the same attitude, not despite, but because of, the rigours and vicissitudes of the professional lives of lawyers and that can have a jading, dehumanising, effect if one is not careful. There is a risk of the loss of that spirit of disinterested enquiry, pursued for its sheer enjoyment, an acquired taste, an essential part of one's humanity: not just for its utility, but which ultimately, inadvertently, has greater utility. When first things are put first, second things will follow; whereas when the contrary applies, both first and second things are lost. Is it not the case that the mathematics which have mattered to us more is not that State or industry-sponsored mathematics, such as existed in ancient Egypt for example, but that disinterested, liberal, mathematical  This is an edited version of an address delivered at