When I was a kid, whole stretches of the UK coastline were filthy. There were places covered in industrial waste (literally black with coal waste). You could get advice on where the coast was too polluted to gather shellfish...
...you didn't go into the sea if you could see an outlet of any kind. The whole coastline was suspect, it was common enough for people to get sick after swimming in the sea...
...wild swimming? That wasn't a thing. Except for a few weirdos. Triathletes and people who did it competitively were extremely careful about where and how...
...what changed this is that by the late 80s we were starting to bring in EU rules on sewage outflow. We stopped pouring human and industrial waste into rivers and into the ocean...
...and now? People safely jump in to rivers. There is no longer an endless slick of poison in our streams. Otters, cormorants, all sorts of wildlife makes it up the tidal part of our rivers into London, Newcastle, anywhere there is brackish water...
...you don't encounter turds when plodging in the sea any more. And, yes, that was a thing. Our drinking water is cleaner - even in our cities its less heavily chlorinated most of the time because water companies aren't treating such filthy feed stock...
...Tory MP's, our government, just voted to go back to that. By dumping raw sewage in the rivers they voted for you and your children to be unsafe when rock-pooling...
...they voted to increase the danger of dysentery, typhoid, cryptosporidosis, campylobacter. They voted to kill the wildlife that has recolonised our waterways and coastlines...
...they voted to kill the remnants of the shellfish industry thats already on its knees due to Brexit. Why is that? The alternative was admitting they were wrong. bloomberg.com/news/articles/….
Brexit means destroying our environment. It means lowering our environmental standards because we can no longer afford a clean environment. It means poisoning our children with raw human effluent...
Brexit means swimming in shit. Is this fixable without rejoining the EU? This one issue, yes, it is. But we can't achieve that until our political class admit the cause of the problem. If we blindly blunder on, people will die due to this.
Its as simple as this - more shit in rivers means more shit in birds. Crudely, gulls swim in it, the eat it and things contaminated in it, and they shit in the reservoirs. The bacteria you shit out end up in your drinking water...
...and also the single biggest contaminant of water pipes is dirty water. The more shit in our rivers the more of this we're going to see. kentlive.news/news/kent-news…
There will be disease outbreaks due to this. There will be deaths. This isn't alarmism, its not scaremongering. Its an inevitability, everything we know about public health and transmissible disease says so. This is beyond scandalous, its murderous.
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