The UK Is in the Shit. It really is, by Robert Bush

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Coming from a floater near you: The UK Is in the Shit. It really is.
by Robert Bush
Medium
Sep 3, 2022

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Photo by Danny Burke on Unsplash

Yes, finally we have gone completely mad over here.

After giving ourselves a good kick in the bollocks with Brexit, we’ve now started pouring neat shit everywhere.

We pour it into our rivers so you can’t sit outside your favourite riverside pub for a pie and a pint at lunchtime without watching streams of shit and other unimaginable stuff float by.

And our seaside towns have huge pipes pumping thousands of gallons of neat shit onto beaches.

Nobody can go near the riverbanks or the coasts due to the stink, and the dangers of catching the plague.

Rats the size of beavers are swimming around having a great time enjoying themselves, the fish not so much.

Within the EU there are very strict rules as to what you can do with your sewage. You have to treat it with chemicals which apparently gets rid of the lumps, and then it can be recycled. But we are no longer in the EU, those interfering bastards across the channel no longer have a say in our lives.

And so, we pour untreated shit into the national ecosystem.

I tell you we’re wallowing in it here, there is shit in the streets, shit in the parks, and worst of all, shit in Marks & Spencers. And you know how much we love M&S.

Sales of Wellington boots have risen 1000% as people wade around in shit, and some have had to buy sandbags to stop the shit from coming in under their doors.

Facemasks once used for Covid are out again and everyone is walking around fully masked because of the stink.

Popular beaches in places like Sussex and Devon had to close when shit began appearing in the shallows and parents were wondering what the brown turrets were made of in their children’s sandcastles.

The authorities warn us that swimming or boating in water that contains human faeces [feces] may put people at risk of developing gastrointestinal problems as well as respiratory, skin, eye or ear infections.

No shit Sherlock, how could we have known that?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that once shit leaves you, you never want to see it again, but currently in England you can relieve yourself in the bathroom and then 10 minutes later wave at your own shit as it floats by.

And in a final and weird irony, you still can’t take your dog for a walk on the shit-covered beach, in case it shits.

They are trying to blame the recent heavy rain; apparently the drainage systems couldn’t cope with the excess water. What? It’s never rained before?

They are also saying that due to the situation in Ukraine there is a shortage of the chemicals needed to break down the shit. Nobody believes that.

There is a partial solution, and that is the whole population have to give up on curries until the crisis is over, or at least cut back on the fresh fruit, and dates. It’s the only way to quell the tide of shit hitting our waterways.

Right in the middle of the warmest summer anyone can remember, our beaches are covered in shit, our rivers are polluted, and it is not stopping anytime soon.

Yours

The United Kingdom of Shit.

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At last, the Tories prove that Brexit has polluted the UK
by Stewart Lee
The Guardian
Sun 28 Aug 2022 05.07 EDT

Having raw sewage lapping around the UK is a fitting symbol of our freedom from the tyranny of EU red tape

Apparently, you can now see the ring of human excrement surrounding Brexit Britain from space, the raw sewage of Brexit’s environmental fallout lapping at the shores of our sceptic isle. The Chinese astronaut Wang Yaping, whom I befriended at one of Robin Ince and Brian Cox’s Hammersmith Apollo space-comedy events while dancing to Charlotte Church’s indie-pop covers band, contacted me from her sleep pod on the Tianhe space station module to describe the sight. “Oh Stewart! From space, Britain now looks like a beautiful green jade earring, but a beautiful green jade earring that has been dropped in an oyster pail Chinese takeaway box full of dog diarrhoea. Oh Stewart!” Wang sighed, clearly distressed, “no fine ladies will want to wear that filthy earring that is Brexit Britain now. So sad. So sad for you. How is your Edinburgh fringe going? I hear Kunt and the Gang’s Shannon Matthews: The Musical is very good.”

Like me, I am sure you remember reasonable Remainers’ warnings about the incoming non-availability of European manufactured, sewage-refining chemicals being dismissed as “project fear”; like me, I am sure you remember how Michael Gove snorted with haughty delight as he promised us leaving the EU would enable us to enjoy even tighter environmental protections, rather than being swamped with raw sewage. Another Brexit-non-bonus; like me, I am sure you worried that the EU’s fines for water pollution by privatised water companies were all that was saving us from capitalism crapping into every culvert, as big business kleptocrats asset-stripped the water infrastructure and processed the profits abroad; like me, I am sure you realised that the Conservatives’ October 2021 decision to vote down an amendment that would have stopped the dumping of raw sewage into seas and rivers would mean their friends who own the water companies would be free to choke our waterways and coastlines; and like me, I am sure you were more than a little bewildered to find that the most consistent voice of reason in this crisis is former Undertones frontman and keen fly fisher Feargal Sharkey. Who can forget the prophetic hit single, Here Comes the Summer, with its classic couplet: “Keep looking for the girls with their bodies so fit, lying on the beaches all covered in shit”?

To be fair, Sharkey is only one of a long line of Northern Irish punk musicians currently engaged in specific water-related political activism. Former Stiff Little Fingers guitarist Henry Cluney is especially concerned about climate change’s impact on the breeding cycle of the water boatman (Corixa punctata); Ronnie Matthews, of Big Time hitmakers Rudi, sponsors a rare pelican eel at Belfast Zoo; while one-time Moondogs bassist Jackie Hamilton has attempted to raise awareness of depletion of the habitat of the gasterosteidae family by living for a year as a stickleback in Fermanagh’s mysterious Lough Erne. Nonetheless, Sharkey’s pop career change is only the second most startling in rock, beaten by that of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, who vacated the bassist’s hammock of 1960s Boston acid rockers Ultimate Spinach, and subsequently the comfortable leather armchair of the same position in Steely Dan, to co-develop the Pentagon’s Son of Star Wars weapon system.

The surface of the enshatted Channel could harden, allowing migrants to simply walk into Brexit Britain on foot

As water bosses’ dividends rise our rivers are suddenly more polluted than ever and our beaches are befilthed by sewage discharge in a way not seen since the 1970s, when I well remember seeing human turds bobbing around the face of Bobby Ball as he bathed blissfully in the Blackpool brine between shows. Back then, we were known as the dirty man of Europe. Today, the dirty man of Europe is Iain Duncan Smith, whose preferred pastime of picking his nose and gobbling down the crusty mucous in the Commons has become a hit “Try not to gag” meme among continental teenagers. But filthy Britain may yet become the dirty man of Europe again.

Ironically, the clogging of the seas around Britain with untreated excrement already threatens the core values of Brexit. Currently, I am in Edinburgh, performing two sold-out shows a day of “so-called” “woke” “comedy”. Between the middle ages and the 19th century, the spot currently occupied by Princes Street Gardens was home to the Nor’ Loch, an artificial lake that became so clogged with the human filth that ran down from the crowded tenements on the north slope of the Royal Mile that in hot summers a crust of excrement would harden across it strong enough to bear the weight of a man.

Indeed, in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), James Boswell recalls Samuel Johnson betting him a hundred guineas that he could not bear him upon his back over the encrusted sewage-lake. Boswell tried his best, but the creme brulee sliver of human waste cracked at around the point where the Ann Summers shop stands today and both Johnson and Boswell fell floundering into the filth, while much hilarity ensued. The problem for the Brexit government is that on a calm day, with a hot sun, the surface of the enshatted English Channel itself could similarly harden, allowing migrants in their millions to simply walk into Brexit Britain on foot, a spectacular own goal of Brexit’s regulations bonfire.

So, swim at your peril, middle-class wild river swimmers, unless you fancy being confined to your ersatz rustic Airbnb travellers’ wagon with sickness, diarrhoea and your children.

But remember Brexit Britain, as you crawl from the sea coated from head to toe in human excrement, it’s what you voted for! Freedom from their red tape! We may be swimming in shit, but at least it’s the shit of Britons unbowed by the yoke of Brussels! Where will this bonanza of post-Brexit deregulation take us next?

Stewart Lee is appearing in a show to raise funds for the David Johnson Emerging Talent award on 28 August, 6pm, at the Gordon Aikman theatre, Edinburgh; Snowflake is on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer at 10.30pm on Sunday 4 September, followed by Tornado on Sunday 11 September

This article was amended on 29 August 2022 to correctly refer to Lough Erne, rather than “Loch” Erne.

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It’s been two years since the UK’s poop-engulfed beaches became a national scandal. Now it’s even worse
by Julia Buckley, CNN
Published 1:00 AM EDT, Sat May 4, 2024
https://edition.cnn.com/england-uk-sewa ... index.html

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A beach in Brighton -- a popular seaside escape for Londoners -- was closed in 2022 due to sewage contamination. Aaron Chown/AP CNN

It was late 2021 when James Richardson heard about England’s poop problem.

“I saw a tweet talking about the extent of the problem, and the numbers were so enormous I thought it couldn’t be true – that there was so much sewage being dumped,” he says now.

“I thought, ‘It’s social media, someone must be exaggerating.’ So I thought I’d look into it, because if it was true it’d be a scandal.”

His research tallied with the tweet: raw sewage was being pumped into England’s rivers and onto beaches at a truly astonishing rate. So-called “storm overflows” – designed to flush overly full drains into rivers, seas and even across beaches – are supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances, as the name suggests. But in 2021, the year Richardson saw the data, they disgorged their contents across the country for a total of 2.7 million hours – equivalent to over 300 years.

Over the past few years, members of the British public have seen beaches closed for swimming on peak summer holiday weekends, dead fish floating in busy rivers, and found themselves surfing effluent-engorged waves.

“First it was the smell,” says Giles Bristow, who once found himself in the middle of a sewage slick when surfing in Staunton, Devon.

“Then we saw toilet paper and sanitary products in the water. That was a real moment of, ‘Oh, god.’”

Over the past few years, the UK’s “poopy beaches” problem has been sparking increasing anger from citizens around the country.

The cancelation of an annual swimming race in the Thames right before the current bank holiday weekend has also caused concern. The race, which has been held since the 1890s, was due to be held in July, but was called off because of fears of sewage in the water.

2022’s August Bank Holiday – a weekend when Brits flock to the beach – saw the closure of a beach in Brighton and Hove, a popular seaside escape for Londoners. “Brighton and Hove seem to be deluged over and over again,” Hugo Tagholm, the ex-CEO of campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (who has now been replaced by Bristow), told CNN at the time.

This weekend is another bank holiday. But while Brighton and Hove beaches are safe to swim at, many others around the UK are not. According to Surfers Against Sewage’s live tracker, 12 out of 14 storm overflows on the Isle of Wight – a popular retreat off the southern coast – are currently emitting sewage. There’s a slew of currently operating overflows in popular vacation spot Devon, too – from ones near towns like Salcomb and Dawlish, to one on Sandy Bay, a beach that has in the past won Blue Flag status for its pristine waters.

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Storm overflow pipes often disgorge their contents onto beaches, like this one in Swanage, Kent. Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

Despite widespread public outcry, the situation has been worsening. Graphs on Richardson’s website, the aptly named Top of the Poops – which focuses on England – showed a slight downward trend from 2020 to 2022, before rising sharply in 2023.

Sewage spills increased by 54% last year, according to data released in March by the Environment Agency – a UK government-founded public body established to “protect and improve” the environment.

Back in 2021, Richardson, a software developer, was so horrified by what he saw that he launched his website to share the data in an accessible way – right down to the name, echoing a TV program from everyone’s childhood, “Top of the Pops.”

Anyone wanting to see the spills in their area can search the data by water company, beach, river, shellfish-cultivation area, and – in bad news for politicians – constituency.

“People can see what’s happening in their local area, and it really shows what a terrible problem we have,” says Richardson. “The numbers are too hard to keep in your mind – and it’s not getting any better.

‘Simply not good enough’

After outrage in 2022 – which included the UK’s chief medical officer labelling it a “growing public health problem” and the Environment Agency chair calling for CEOs of the offending water companies to be jailed – things have worsened.

The annual “Event Duration Monitoring” (EDM) of storm overflows in England, released in March, said sewage spills had increased in 2023 by 54%. The average number of yearly spills per overflow had increased from 23 in 2022 to 33 – equivalent to more than one per fortnight. The total spills went from 301,091 to 464,056.

Worse still, sewage spilled into UK waters for double the amount of time in 2023 that it did in 2022: a whopping 3.6 million hours, or the equivalent of over 400 years.

There were fewer “well behaved” overflows, as well. Those that spilled fewer than 10 times in a year were down from 48% in 2022 to 40% in 2023. And those that didn’t spill at all went from 18% to 13.9%. Those overflows for “exceptional” circumstances have become all to common.

The terse verdict from the Environment Agency? “Simply not good enough.”

“It’s a total scandal,” says Giles Bristow, who is CEO of marine conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage. “Things have got massively worse – it’s a shocker.”

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Campaign group Surfers Against Sewage have created an app to show real-time information for beaches. Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures/Getty Images

A Surfers Against Sewage report found that 1,924 people fell ill after entering the UK’s waters between October 2022 and September 2023 – three times the number reported the previous year. The Liberal Democrats political party is campaigning for victims to be compensated by the water companies.

Bristow attributes blame to “massive underinvestment by private water companies who’ve failed to do their duty.” UK water services were privatized in 1989.

Richardson is particularly aggrieved because his provider, Thames Water, splits his bill into two portions. “One is for fresh water, the other – about half your bill – is for treating sewage,” he says. “So it’s shocking to find out that they’re essentially fly-tipping this stuff.”

In 2021, Thames Water was fined £4 million (just under $5 million) for a 2016 incident in which it discharged an estimated half-a-million liters of raw sewage into streams near Richardson’s home, killing around 3,000 fish. The judge imposing the fine called it “disgraceful.”

In November 2023, it was estimated that the company had poured at least 72 billion liters of sewage into the Thames, England’s longest river, since 2020. Thames Water did not respond to a request for comment from CNN. Previously, the water company has said it is working to improve infrastructure to prevent future discharges.

“It’s like paying for your recycling to be taken away and finding they’re just dumping it in the sea,” says Richardson.

“We pay quite a lot for water in England. We’re not asking them to make the rivers better – just not to dump stuff in there.”

A global problem

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A sewage spill closed Long Beach, California, in April 2023. Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Of course, sewage in the water is nothing new – and it’s not just a problem in the UK.

For instance, in 2018, then-president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte closed Boracay island in the Philippines for almost six months, calling it a “cesspool”

The US is no stranger to sewage spills, either. One closed the sands of Long Beach, California, in 2022, and again in April 2023.

Bristow – who still happily enters the water, but advises checking Surfers Against Sewage’s real-time pollution-tracking app before doing so – calls water pollution “a global issue.” But he also says that many other countries are better at dealing with sewage – and monitoring it, too. In France, for example, the public can access daily updates about water quality in their area.

“The UK has consistently bumped along the bottom of European tables [for water cleanliness],” he says.

In 2020 (the last year that the UK was part of the EU), the country had the lowest quality bathing water in Europe, with just 17.2% of UK beaches rated as “excellent.” Compare that to Cyprus, where all beaches made the grade, or Greece, where 97.1% were ranked excellent.

Compare it, too, to 2022’s data, where – in lieu of the UK, which no longer figures in the statistics, since it’s no longer part of the EU – the lowest-rating country is Poland, with 55.9% of its beaches rated excellent for water quality.

It’s not just the beaches. According to 2019 data, just 14% of England’s rivers and lakes were classed as having “good ecological status.”

In 2012, the European Commission took the UK to the European Court of Justice for breaching wastewater regulations.

As Chris Whitty, then the UK’s chief medical officer, wrote in his 2022 report, “Nobody wants a child to ingest human faeces.”

“It’s vital we aren’t reclassified as ‘the dirty man of Europe,’” Hugo Tagholm told CNN that same summer.

Poop as a political issue

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Storm overflows are a common sight on the UK's beaches. Here, a child is playing with the discharge from an overflow on Borth Beach, Wales. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

So how can things improve?

The UK’s Victorian drainage system is often blamed for not being able to handle 21st-century levels of sewage. Adding to the pressure, rainwater runoff passes through the same pipes as wastewater from houses and offices. Add in increasingly extreme weather events thanks to the climate crisis, and you have a recipe for overflowing drains.

And yet, that doesn’t quite explain the situation in the UK. According to research from the Royal Society of Chemistry, storm overflows should only enter use when sewers are at six times their usual volume. Yet data from the UK’s Met Office shows that 2021 and 2022 were actually drier than average years, and 2023 was only 11% wetter than average.

Bristow wants “smarter,” climate-proof solutions for what looks set to be a wetter UK climate.

In fact, forget just widening pipes – he wants to prevent rain from even making it as far as the drains. He suggests initiatives such as reforesting areas to hold back heavy rain, or introducing wetlands, as providing a “natural defense.”

None of this will be quick. Surfers Against Sewage is campaigning for an end to discharges in bathing water and high-priority nature sites by 2030. Bristow says they’re in talks with all major political parties in the run up to the UK’s next General Election, which must take place before January 28, 2025.

In the meantime, 2023 saw the government fitting monitors to all England’s storm overflows, so that data can at least be gathered.

The government’s “Storm overflows discharge reduction plan,” published in 2022, sets targets for water companies to “reduce the impact of storm overflows” by 2050.

“It’ll take time to turn the tank around, but the tide is turning,” says Bristow. “We should expect to see things turn around by 2030 if we’re making the right investment decisions now. The time to act is now or never.”

That sounds like six more years of poopy beaches, but Bristow is adamant that nobody should put off a trip to the UK coastline because of the sewage problems.

“We have some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and hospitable communities,” he says. “Come and surf, enjoy our beaches and our breaks. But download the [Surfers Against Sewage] app, and know where to go in.”