The chair of Water UK, Ruth Kelly, has said, “We have listened to the public, and they are right to be upset about the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches.”
Because sometimes you don’t know you’re doing something a bit antisocial until it’s pointed out to you. Your bag might be in the way on a train, and it’s only when another passenger says, “Excuse me, can I move this please?” that you realise.
And it’s the same with pouring hundreds of tons of turds onto a beach. It’s only when members of the public say, “Excuse me, I came here for a swim and now I look like a prisoner from a freedom fighting group staging a dirty protest in their cell,” that you say, “Oh I am sorry” and you realise you’ve been a nuisance.
Water UK says it will try and cut the number of sewage spill incidents by 140,000 a year before 2030. Other industries should employ the same rigorous targets. If a restaurant poisons 30 per cent of its customers because they forget to cook the chicken and serve it raw, and they serve water they’ve collected from a puddle outside a nuclear power plant and they put rat urine on the salads instead of olive oil, they can say, “We hope to reduce the incidents of violent wretching by 140,000 a year before 2030.”
The sewage spills work out at 824 per day, so this has made a day out on the beach or in the countryside a gamble. It will end up as a game show on Channel 5.
A presenter will announce, “For today’s contest we’ve taken six couples for a day out on Britain’s beaches. Three lucky winners will have a lovely time splashing about and enjoying a picnic, but our losers will suddenly find their children crying ‘Mummy, Daddy, why am I covered in clumps of hair and dried chip fat and used tampons?'”
Ruth Kelly made her apology even more heartfelt when she said, “This is our chance to put things right.”
Other people might suggest there was another time when the water companies had a chance to put things right, which was before they put things wrong. If you asked most people “when do you have the best chance to not cover a beach with shite?”, I think most of them would answer, “Before you cover the beach in shite.”
But that’s because the common person doesn’t understand the intricate ways that water and sewage works.
It’s much easier to cover something in shite and then say you’ll clear it up when a series of regulators scream at you because millions of people can’t go in the sea anymore, than it is to not put it there in the first place. It’s something to do with the viscosity of shite.
Even so, there are very strict fines handed out to water companies that break the rules. Anglian Water were fined £2.65m for pouring millions of litres of sewage into the North Sea, a cruel and devastating lesson for the shareholders no doubt.
Water UK have added to their apology by saying water bills will have to rise to cover the work that has to be done to reduce this sewage being poured everywhere.
That seems fair, just as if you run a florists and sometimes a customer buys a bunch of tulips, and when you give it to them you also squirt diarrhoea at them through a hose. If they want to get their clothes cleaned, you should charge them extra. Why should you have to take money out of your profits just because they’re all too la-di-da to walk round smelling of your faeces?
In fact, it would only be fair if the water companies passed on the fines they receive to their customers as well. Why should the shareholders have to fork out every time they’re fined for illegally pumping gunge onto a beach, when the only reason they get fined is because the public want to walk on an un-excremented beach? They’ve caused the problem so they should have to pay for it.
Since the water industry was privatised, the companies have made £66bn in profits. And they’ve been worth every penny. Because they’ve educated our children, who can now experience what life was like in the 14th century.
And they’ve made festivals like Glastonbury so much more enticing, because as well as seeing the Arctic Monkeys on the Pyramid Stage, you can go to the temporary toilet and savour the smell of human waste and think, “It’s nowhere near as foul as the weekend we spent at Bexhill-on-Sea.”
Maybe if they put the prices up even further, they could redirect the sewage onto beaches in Kent, and after a couple of years we could squelch our way across it to France, which would be handy for easing the congestion around Dover.
But now it should all be sorted, because Water UK are very sorry, and they will soon carry out their plans to no longer pollute the beaches and rivers. Instead they’ll start pouring it onto motorways and children’s play areas and into swimming pools and onto bowling greens.
Then they’ll be fined £25 and say they’re really sorry and assure us all that now is the perfect opportunity to put that right.
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