Day two of the Unicorn Kingdom. A world where fantasy always outdoes reality. That fair and septic isle. Who needs to go for a walk by a canal or river? Why bother to go to the beach? All you need to do is have a dump at home. Where to have an open cesspit is the latest status symbol. The estate agent’s dream. Your very own swimming pool. What more could anyone want?
To be fair, Thérèse Coffey has done more to level up the country than any of her cabinet colleagues. Though, technically speaking, one should call it levelling down. For on the environment secretary’s watch there isn’t a river in England that isn’t hopelessly polluted and subject to sewage overflow many times a day.
Windermere now has a 5-mile stretch of shoreline that’s turned bright green. William Wordsworth would have had quite the poem to write about that. Earth has not anything to show more fair … And you take your life into your own taking a dip in the sea. Hepatitis? That will do nicely.
But every cloud and all that. Water quality may be a national health hazard, but it’s an easy win for a Labour opposition day debate. And just over a week out from the local elections any opportunity to stick it to the Tories is too good to pass up. Because whether the Conservatives like it or not, they have no one to blame but themselves. Sewage and God knows what else – a few limbs from Dominic Raab’s victims maybe – has been spilling out by the tonne on their watch.
That’s if anyone has been actually watching. Because the environment secretary has never appeared really bothered about it. Or anything else much on her patch. She is the minister for whom everything is too much trouble. Apart from racking up the air miles on jaunts around the world. Coffey has managed to fall out with just about everyone on her watch. From the farmers to conservationists. To ordinary people who would quite like to just go outdoors without needing to wear a hazmat suit.
The shadow environment secretary, Jim McMahon, opened the debate with a long catalogue of Tory failures. He looked as if he was enjoying himself. The proverbial pig in shit. Time and again he barked out the phrase “Tory sewage scandal” and time and again the 30 or so Conservative MPs who had showed their faces recoiled in faux outrage. It wasn’t exactly clear who they had imagined had been in government for the past 13 years. Selective memories and all that.
There would be 70 more sewage dumps just in the course of this three-hour debate, McMahon went on. And it was all down to Coffey. Because in her previous incarnation as a junior minister, she had written to all the water companies to say they could pretty much do as they liked. Under Labour, the water quality had been unsurpassed. Apparently. So pure it could have been bottled. He dared Tory MPs to shout him down while refusing to take many interventions. He didn’t exactly say how he was going to fix the situation. That was something for another day. When Labour were in power.
Next up was Coffey herself. Keen to make clear that she would happily go knee-deep in sewage on any beach. Because that was what being British was all about. It was time for people to stop moaning and embrace the filth. After all, it never killed anyone. Well, not many people. And it was all just as bad as it was under Labour. Back in 2010, we didn’t know how bad things were. Now we do. So that must be an improvement, mustn’t it? At least we could now take ownership of our own shit.
“We’ve got a grown-up plan,” said Coffey. It was unfortunate then that she couldn’t remember exactly what it was as she had no idea how she was going to make the water companies pay to stop the spills. Though she didn’t think automatic fines were the right way forward, as the spills might turn out to be worse than we thought. So best to fine the water companies next to nothing.
If we were to nationalise the water companies and stump up the £56bn needed then we’d have to stop funding our hospitals. She seemed to have forgotten that the government had been underfunding the NHS for years. Then she also said she was looking forward to winning the next election. So we can put her down as a little confused.
Thereafter things rather fell apart. As debates go, file this one as unenlightening. Labour MPs said the sewage was symbolic of the Tory administration as a whole. “You’re poo.” “No, you’re poo.” The kind of insults eight-year-olds hurl at one another. Lee Anderson said he didn’t want to get into divisive party politics but Labour were just a pile of shite. Irony rather escapes our Lee.
Other Tories leapt to say you couldn’t blame the Tories for England but you could blame Labour for Wales. Bob Seely said the UK had been fined by the EU over water quality under Labour. He had forgotten that we now couldn’t be fined as we had left the EU. There was a Brexit bonus no one had told us about. The right to pump crap into our own rivers without the EU checking up on us.
It was all a bit tawdry. But for the opposition it was job done. The Tories might have thrown in a wrecking amendment to render the whole thing meaningless but Labour could still claim that Tory MPs had voted to make it easier to pump shit into our water.
