Last Monday, the Conservative government announced plans to scrap the water pollution rules that protect rivers from environmental damage caused by nearby housebuilding. Some people accuse Sunak’s government of being a zombie government, trapped by infighting and incompetence in legislative inertia, incapable of seeing any task through. This is unfair on zombies who, given enough time, often overwhelm shopping malls, eat people’s brains, or fight sharks underwater. If a barely sentient zombie can do all this, it makes the Conservative’s failure to Stop the Boats ™ ® and Get Brexit Done ™ ® seem even less impressive.
But during their time in office the Conservatives will at least have achieved the comprehensive choking to death of our pesky seas and rivers, once teeming with unruly life, providing leisure opportunities to ungrateful peasants, and offering employment opportunities to the ne’er-do-wells who don’t vote Conservative – surfboard hire operators, conservationists, and a Spanish hippy who sits at the prow of the boat on a cruise round Camden Lock, serenading you relentlessly with detumescent Neil Young covers on a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar.
On Tuesday, the Conservatives’ necrotic new policy was defended on Sky News by the transport secretary, Mark Harper, the MP for the Forest of Dean, where the now utterly befouled and once so beautiful River Wye slopes along beneath the sylvan canopy, a slow-moving open sewer of unregulated chicken-farm waste runoff, turds, wet wipes, and feckless water company sewage discharge. Harper should swim in it every day, naked and alone, his mouth forced open with clothes pegs, until he vomits himself inside out, or, due to some Marvel comics-style chemical accident, turns into a half human, half chicken Conservative supervillain, divebombing Sadiq Khan with radioactive eggs full of lies.
Harper voted remain, as everyone should have, but now parrots the desperate anti-EU bullshit of a cowardly loyalist, trying to blame every ill on an imagined enemy that is no longer especially interested in the far away bleating of our now internationally impotent nation. And Harper, when immigration minister in 2014, employed a cleaner who did not have permission to be in the UK, while at the same time overseeing a campaign in which lorries drove around London sporting hoardings that read: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” I bet Harper wishes he’d hung on to that cleaner. Maybe they could help dredge the human shit out of his constituency’s major open sewer, the same magnificent River Wye once so memorably memorialised by Turner, Wordsworth, and Netflix’s teen drama Sex Education.
Speaking to Sky’s clearly exasperated and baffled Jayne Secker, Harper toed a Tory line in the sewage-stained sand, and wanged on thus: “The scheme is about making sure we can build up to 100,000 new houses with the new freedoms we have now we are outside the European Union… to make sure people have the homes that they want to live in, but we’ve got important rules to make sure that we continue to improve the water standards in our rivers across the country.” All right Mark! See you for a swim in the Wye then, why not? Don’t forget to bring your sick bag. And a cork to stuff up your Symonds Yat!
Given the Conservatives’ track record on enforcing environmental protections, I am sure we have nothing to worry about. Because, as Michael Gove promised in November 2017, we could actually improve our environmental standards outside the EU. “Leaving the EU gives us the opportunity to put the environment at the heart of policymaking, while ensuring vital protections for our landscapes, wildlife and natural assets are not only maintained but enhanced,” Gove explained in a government statement, allaying environmentalists’ worries that the removal of EU legislation would lead to an open season for polluters. And remember, David Cameron once posed with a husky in some snow, so there was nothing to fear.
In March the following year, in a speech to something called Prosperity UK, an excited Gove even promised: “Brexit, with the right decisions, can enhance our natural environment.” Meanwhile, in June this year, the River Roding Trust reported: “Our local heron on the Roding has changed its behaviour in the last few months; standing with its back to the river looking at the bank, rather than surveying the water for fish. Today we found out why: the lack of fish in the river has apparently made it hunt rats instead!” Maybe, as a celebration of the Brexit freedoms and new environmental opportunities his Brexit campaigning won us, Michael Gove should be made to stand on one leg on the edge of a polluted river and eat rats as well. I am sure he has ingested more deadly substances than mere rat. There is no record of how the River Roding heron voted in the EU referendum, but it is said to be looking forward to the abolition of EU regulations that restrict vacuum cleaner power to 900W.
So why are the Tories scrapping more environmental regulation to encourage more housebuilding? As usual, the punk rock water bailiff Feargal Sharkey fished out the answer on Twitter. In May this year, the Independent reported: “Housebuilders and developers – who in the past have accounted for around a fifth of all donations – have turned off the taps… The Home Builders Federation has accused the government of having ‘anti-development and anti-business’ policies which threaten to dramatically slow development. And in December the government was slammed by developers for scrapping building targets.” Clearly something has to be done about the housing shortage, but does it have to involve herons eating rats?
In other news, horrifying pictures have emerged of thousands of tents simply abandoned by Leeds music festivalgoers as, their revels ended, they quit the scene and leave the mess for someone else to fix. The outgoing Conservatives are doing the same to our country, and we didn’t even get to see Imagine Dragons.
