Paul Kirkley: How Tories fell in line to get the jobby done over sewage, plus Brexit, The Beatles and masks
Hands up, who had ‘more raw sewage in rivers and seas’ on their Brexit Sunlit Uplands bingo card?
Because that was the charming picture of Britain’s future painted by the government’s new post-Brexit Environment Bill, which all but 22 Tory MPs saw fit to back.
But wait! It seems that, on this issue, we may have found a line that even the British public – bored into submission by what seems like hourly crises, cock-ups and corruption scandals – aren’t prepared to cross.
Which is why people have been very publicly asking why their MPs are so keen on sewage all of a sudden. Are they in the pocket of Big Poo (Big Jobby?), perhaps? Or do they just think basic sanitation is the sort of namby-pamby Brussels bureaucratic meddling we voted to do away with?
Despite Environment Agency figures showing that Anglian Water spent 170,326 hours discharging sewage into local rivers during 2020, you won’t be surprised to hear our local Conservative MPs were not along the rebels. On the contrary, faithful government bag-carrier Lucy Frazer (South East Cambs) is about as amenable to rebels as Darth Vader was. If Boris Johnson made a case for giving poisoned milk to schoolchildren, Ms Frazer would be the first to say, “Let’s at least hear him out”…
And don’t expect a sudden attack of conscience from business secretary Steve Barclay (North East Cambs), who recently spent a busy day doing the media rounds and repeatedly refusing to apologise for the worst public health failure in British history. In other words, sorry seems to be the hardest word – but slurry positively trips off the tongue.
Then there’s Anthony Browne (South Cambs). But there’s no point asking him about it: he’ll just send his standard reply (“please leave me alone, tiresome peasants”).
To be fair, Mr Browne did meet with environment secretary George Eustice last week, during which he “urged him to take the strongest possible action” on the issue. But, having already trooped through the Division Lobby and voted to Keep On Pumpin’, that does feel a bit like urging the stable door to take the strongest possible action towards closing after the horse has bolted.
If we can’t rely on our elected representatives to oppose dumping sewage in rivers, at least we can rely on... [checks notes] Feargal Sharkey.
That’s right, the former Undertones singer is a long-standing campaigner against pollution in British rivers – as regular readers will know: last year he told the Cambridge Independent that “because of over-abstraction and poison by phosphates, the Cam is no longer a proper river”. A good Cam these days is hard to find, if you will.
Sharkey’s interest in the subject arose out of his lifelong passion for fly-fishing (he is chairman of the Amwell Magna Fishery in Hertfordshire, which is not something I imagine many former punk rockers can say). Ironic, really, as freshwater rivers aren’t generally very… you know, sharkey.
Anyway, Feargal spent much of last week trying to get #Sewage as the top-trending topic on Twitter. “Let’s make it number one!” he tweeted (though surely number two would have been more appropriate?). I wonder if, when he was a young Turk singing about getting his Teenage Kicks, he ever thought he’d one day be engaged in this sort of chart battle: from the hit parade to the s**t parade, from the music business to the, er, business business. Good on ’im, though.
Science news now, and Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has revealed that MPs on the government benches don’t need to wear facemasks because they are protected by “a convivial fraternal spirit”. (Other immunologists are available.)
Meanwhile, ‘care minister’ (it says here) Gillian Keegan suggested in the Daily Telegraph that wearing masks should not become “a sign of virtue”, which is definitely a helpful message for a top health official to be sending out in a global pandemic.
It’s funny how, in the Telegraph’s world this month, masks are seen as optional, but poppies appear to be compulsory. Maybe they should invent a poppy you can wear over your face, and then everyone will be happy?
Pop desk, and chancellor Rishi Sunak used last week’s Budget to shovel £2m towards a possible new Beatles attraction on Liverpool’s waterfront.
Which is nice, because if there’s one band you never hear about these days, it’s The Beatles. It’s all Herman’s Hermits this, Freddie and the Dreamers that… So it’s about time John, Paul, George and wossisface got a look in.
Don’t get me wrong, I love The Beatles. They are probably the greatest band of all time. In fact I was wearing a Beatles t-shirt when I heard the chancellor’s announcement, and I’m already counting the sleeps until the release of Peter Jackson’s incredible-looking Get Back docu-series. But does Liverpool really need more Beatles tourism? It’s not like they’ve exactly been keeping a lid on it until now, is it? What next – a grant to promote Shakespeare in Stratford, or universities in Cambridge?
Apparently the money – to allow the city to develop a business case for the attraction – was partly a result of lobbying by the Liverpool-born culture secretary, Nadine Dorries. Which is interesting, because you just know that, if The Beatles had formed 50 years later, Nadine Dorries would hate them – especially that gobby lefty upstart John.
It’s also slightly depressing that, while Brexit is making it financially impossible for many British bands to play on the continent, Covid wreaks havoc on live music venues and the government proposes a 50 per cent funding cut for university arts courses, the culture secretary prefers to wallow in Union Jack biscuit tin pop nostalgia.
While Britain’s world-leading creative sector could undoubtedly do with a helping hand right now, The Beatles industry is more than capable of taking care of itself. So let it be.
Finally, back to those sunlit uplands. Remember when Boris got Brexit done? What a relief to see the end of all that unpleasantness, eh readers?
But, of course, it wasn’t the end: it was just the start of many years of tedious and damaging wrangling, with the government now threatening to rip up its own deal over Northern Ireland, as a second front opens up with France over fishing.
You might be wondering why the UK’s puffed up Brexit minister, Lord Frost – aka Frosty the No Man – is continuing to play such hardball, when it’s clearly in everyone’s interest to dial down the sabre-rattling.
But the truth, of course, is that, with Brexit reality starting to bite at home, it suits this government to have enemies to fight. For years, the EU was the straw man that kept the Tories’ fragile coalition together. So they’re hardly likely to give it up now, are they? Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. And it always will be.
Paul Kirkley was named Columnist of the Year at the 2021 UK Regional Press Awards. Read more from Paul Kirkley every month in the Cambridge Independent
