There are important questions to be asked about lavatories, and Kemi Badenoch is certainly the Tory best suited to answering them. A report in the government’s Daily Telegraph mouthpiece announced that a new government initiative would see the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, appoint a Tory lavatories tsar, a task that would doubtless make her flush with pride. But the Independent then reported that the government had “distanced” itself from this appointment, for fear of increased bureaucracy, and also, presumably, across-the-board toilet tsar-based ridicule.
Apparently, Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar would have ensured that all new offices, schools, hospitals and entertainment venues have separate male and female lavatories; a big job and a massive piece of business. But our children’s generation seem largely ambivalent about gender identity, and the practical lavatorial considerations that come with it; first-wave feminists, in contrast, are understandably anxious that women’s hard-won recognitions are not, as they see it, eroded; meanwhile, some young women tell me they fear the loss of certified spaces in nightclubs and pubs for crying, vomiting up alcopops and avoiding young men; most young men, however, seem comfortable with the idea of urinating indiscriminately on the floor, while simultaneously passing wind, in any toilet, however Kemi Badenoch choses to designate the toilet’s gender.
Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar’s appointment was doubtless a well-meaning gesture from a government consistently defined by its genuine concern for society’s most vulnerable minorities, but the issues it raises have had the unintended effect of enflaming the culture war, the stoking of which is, by unfortunate coincidence, the Tories’ only chance of holding on to power. Of course, there has never been a worse time in British history for Kemi Badenoch to appoint Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar, and to insist on the provision of more public lavatories, an act that would have been seen by future generations as a crime comparable to the detonation of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima, or when that spade goes in the otter’s head in Ring of Bright Water.
Already, a crumbling water infrastructure, fatally wounded by decades of criminal underinvestment by private owners, cannot cope with current sewage levels, resulting in regular discharges of untreated human muck into our seas and rivers at unprecedented levels, often hazardous to health. More than 90% of freshwater habitats in our most valued rivers are soiled by raw human excrement. Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar would have had to pause to consider if it is appropriate, today, to encourage the construction of yet more toilets, and thus to facilitate the release of yet more excrement into an already fatally compromised privately owned sewage system.
It is of course important that all people, irrespective of their gender identity, should be allowed to void their bowels copiously and at will, albeit discreetly, behind closed doors in designated public spaces, as loudly as they like. But just as the allowance of legionnaires’ disease-infected barges, and the removal of welcoming murals, is designed to deter asylum seekers from claiming legitimate sanctuary here in the UK, on the grounds that the system simply cannot cope, should there be, in turn, not a designated increase but in fact a reduction in public toilet provision, in order to prevent the public from pumping further human filth into an already clogged system? I, for one, believe there should.
Kemi Badenoch’s appointment of Kemi Badenoch’s tory lavatory tsar would have been just another example of the well-meaning Tories’ nonetheless worrying inability to practise the art of joined-up thinking. You cannot encourage further fossil fuel production while at the same time obstructing those who will be displaced by the environmental catastrophes you have contributed to. Similarly, you cannot preside over the filthification of our waters while at the same time encouraging the building of yet more lavatories, all essentially just sluices that channel human excrement down Victorian lead pipes to further befoul our beauty spots.
While Tory attempts to use lavatory construction regulation to address anxieties about gender identity will doubtless be sincere, their legacy will be measured in the damage they do to our already ailing environment. It seems harsh to make legitimate asylum seekers live for four days on a barge infected with a fatal disease, just as it seemed harsh when the 18th-century British army colonel Henry Bouquet floated the idea of dispersing smallpox-infected blankets among the “disaffected tribes of indians, because we must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them”. But the criminal people-smugglers must be discouraged, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Likewise, it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect private, foreign-owned water companies to stem their profits in order to save our seas and rivers. But the flow of excrement into British waters must be stopped, and the only way to do that, it appears, is to stop it at source.
Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar’s first priority would have been to stop the flow of filth into our lavatories themselves. This could be done by the compulsory withdrawal of all fibrous foods from our supermarkets, and then by the provision of biodegradable “jobbie bags” to every household, which, once filled by hand, can be tossed into the food recycling bin, rather than flushed into our rivers. If it helps placate Daily Express readers, the Tory lavatory tsar could have insisted the excrement bags are colour-coded, depending on the gender identity of the defecatee, so that all are sorted and then disposed of in gender-appropriate receptacles.
This is the only valid course of Tory lavatory action. While Kemi Badenoch’s current Tory lavatory tsar’s scheme to increase public toilet provision may prove popular with a minority of the trans-fearing public, it spells certain death for our seas, our rivers, and the fish and water creatures that do sport and play within them.
You say “Kemi Badenoch’s Tory lavatory tsar”; I say “Kemi Badenoch shitting on Feargal Sharkey’s human face – for ever”.
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