Last month, August, 27 million people in England lived under water restrictions. Nine water companies banned hosepipes, and Southern Water wanted a full drought order for Hampshire. Breaking the ban cost a household up to £1,000. England and Wales have recorded their driest July on record. Meanwhile, on a semi-arid rock with no rivers, Malta waters its front gardens without a second thought. We shower through heatwaves, hose down our cars and top up the pool. Nobody rations, nobody queues at a standpipe, and nobody remembers. That forgetfulness is the genuine achievement of the story. Malta solved a problem so thoroughly that we no longer know we had it.

We had it badly, and within living memory. Malta's aquifers held up under the British, but the postwar boom drained them. By the 1960s, salinity in the groundwater had climbed to 800 parts per million. The government turned to multi-stage flash distillation, boiling seawater at enormous cost in fuel. It also imported water from Sicily by tanker, a humiliation for a new island state. In the 1970s, Dom Mintoff's government answered the demand the cheap way and drilled boreholes everywhere. The aquifer paid the price for that shortcut. By 1980, the average salinity in the sea-level aquifer had reached 1,600 milligrams per litre. The World Health Organisation set its threshold at 600. Gozo fared no better; the drilling drew salt water up beneath the pumps. In the droughts of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the supply itself failed. Households in parts of Malta received water two or three days a week. People stored it in buckets, in bathtubs and in rooftop tanks, and planned their days around it.

Fairness demands the next sentence, and my Labour readers will welcome it. The first big answer came from Mintoff's own administration. In 1981, the government chose reverse osmosis, a technology that forces seawater through membranes at high pressure. Għar Lapsi came on stream within 11 months, between 1982 and 1983. It produced 20,000 cubic metres a day and ranked among the largest plants of its kind anywhere. Marsa followed in 1983 and Tigné in 1986. Labour did not solve the problem, but it chose the right tool.

The Nationalists, in office from 1987, finished the job at scale. Ċirkewwa opened in 1988 with 18,600 cubic metres a day. Pembroke opened in 1994 with 54,000, more than every earlier plant combined. According to the Water Services Corporation (WSC) most recent annual report, Pembroke supplies over half of all reverse osmosis water. The same government created the Water Services Corporation in January 1992. The WSC's own history admits the point without embarrassment. Before its birth, water shortages ranked as a major political and social issue. By 1995, national capacity had reached 52 million cubic metres a year, or 350 litres per person per day. The shortage simply vanished from public life and from memory. A generation grew up thinking that water comes from the tap.

Then came the lesson that reliability creates its own problems. Once supply became dependable, demand rose, and the old pipes leaked under the additional pressure. The WSC spent years mapping the network, managing pressure, and replacing mains. Abundance needed maintenance as much as scarcity had needed investment.

Gozo waited longest for its own supply. For decades, the island depended on its boreholes and a submarine pipeline carrying water from Malta. In November 2021, a Labour government finally closed that gap. The WSC opened an €11 million reverse osmosis plant at Ħondoq ir-Rummien, Qala, partly funded by the EU. It produces 9,000 cubic metres a day inside a restored 1960s distillation building that stood empty for 30 years. Gozo now produces its own water, with excess available for Malta. Three governments, two parties, and forty years produced one uninterrupted policy. Nobody tore up a predecessor's plant to build a rival one. Governments consistently expanded existing foundations. Cross-administration planning like this is not often seen in Malta.

Here lies the irony that prompted this column. During August's power cuts, several Labour supporters blamed the Nationalists. Their argument ran that the PN never built enough generating capacity. The same critics showered, hosed their cars, and watered their gardens while the electricity flickered. They thanked no one, of either party, for the water. Yet water and power belong to one system. Reverse osmosis is actually electricity in liquid form. At its peak in 1995, making and moving water consumed more than one-eighth of the country's electricity. The biggest energy consumer in Maltese households was the household water supply. Every shower during a blackout draws on kilowatt-hours the grid can barely spare. The August outages therefore threatened water too, and only 400,000 cubic metres of reservoir storage hid it. Twenty-four reservoirs bought the time that Enemalta lacked.

The difference from power could not be sharper. Water got a plan in 1981, another in 1987, and a third in 2021. Power got a promise in 2013, a gas plant, a corruption case and an apology in 2026. The heatwave demanded a record 741 megawatts in July, against a 2023 peak of 663. Nobody planned for population growth or for a warming climate. Water engineers planned for both, quietly and without applause, across four decades.

England offers Malta a mirror worth holding up. Britain has rain, rivers and reservoirs, yet it rations in summer. Despite possessing none of those attributes, Malta does not have such rations. The difference lies in investment that started early and survived every change of party. Reverse osmosis does not care which minister cut the ribbon on which plant. It cares whether the next government keeps the membranes clean and the pumps powered.

The lesson reaches well beyond water, into every ministry on these islands. Our forgotten shortage proves that Maltese governments can solve hard problems when they build on each other's work. Labour chose the technology, the Nationalists scaled it, and Labour completed the archipelago. All three deserve credit, and none of us deserve gratitude since we forgot. The next time the lights go out, remember that the shower still runs. Then ask why one utility earned continuity and the other earned excuses.