Two bad-smelling words beginning with ‘B’… and a John Martyn footnote

Is it any wonder that Brexit as a word is only a slip from ‘Brexshit’?

Brexit itself is relatively newly coined, while the second neologism pops up on some social media posts about the government’s seeming willingness to allow our rivers and seas to be polluted under the legalised daylight robbery of privatisation.

Some Tories still insist against all available evidence that leaving the European Union has been a godsend to Britain. They are more than likely the same slippery shysters who swear our waters are getting cleaner, even while allowing more sewage and wasted fertiliser to leak into rivers and the seas brownly lapping our shores.

You see, believing in Brexit requires you to turn a blind eye to all the economic havoc it has wrought. And believing that privatisation purifies water requires the biggest peg imaginable to be clamped to your nose.

The musician and campaigner Feargal Sharkey has become an unlikely saint in this environmental battle, pointing to the stinky evidence while the likes of Therese Coffey, the environment minister, look the other way.

Sharkey appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and uttered a sentence as simple as it was terrifying: “We are slowly killing every single river in the country.”

Sharkey was there to herald a new campaign by The Times. Now it’s far from always the case that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch do something to lift the heart, but the Clean It Up Water Campaign shows that sometimes they do right.

The Times reported on its front page that water companies privately lobbied to weaken the government’s £56bn plan to reduce sewage spills from storm overflows.

It suggests the companies argued the plan risked adding hundreds of pounds to household bills. In an entirely sensible editorial, the paper argues that if Britain wishes to enjoy the levels of water quality other European countries take for granted, then customer bills must be allowed to rise.

As Sharkey pointed out on GMB, in 2012 the EU Commission took the government to the European Court of Justice over allowing water companies to dump sewage into rivers. The court ruled that this was illegal.

And there’s another link with Brexit: leaving Europe allows us, basically, to have less clean water. Whoopee! Time for a round of I Spy A Brexit Turd (oh look, there’s Nigel Farage).

Another Times story published as part of this campaign has the headline: “Sewage pumped into Oxfordshire stream for 95 hours in seven days.” The river in question is Hardwick Brook, in the Rushy Common Nature Reserve near Witney, and the usual suspect in this case is Thames Water.

The privatisation of water is all part of the long hangover left by Thatcherism.

While Margaret Thatcher remains a sainted figure to some, the longer the distance between her time and now, the easier it is to see the harm she did, from wrecking the housing market with right-to-buy to introducing free-market ideology into every corner of our lives.

The lie was always that private companies would know how to run everything more efficiently. Perhaps sometimes they do, but what they really know is how to make money for themselves, off the back of the taxpayer.

As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, looking ahead to water privatisation, almost says in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – “Water, water everywhere/ Nor any drop that doesn’t stink…”

MY thoughts last week on the 50th anniversary of John Martyn’s album Solid Air raised a few contributions and polite heckles on Facebook.

While my stream nowadays is mostly full of adverts, the original benefit of Facebook sometimes still surfaces. In this case, it was friends from long ago chipping in with their memories.

A Salford University concert was mentioned in my piece. I thought this was in 1972/73 but it was in fact in 1975. Martyn was by himself in my mind, as that mental picture glows the brightest. Turns out he was (possibly) with Danny Thompson, and definitely with Paul Kossoff, the troubled guitarist from the band Free, who died a year later, aged only 25.

My favourite contribution was from a friend unmet since those days. She collected ticket stubs from the concerts we used to attend in Manchester in the 1970s, and was able to say when the John Martyn gig was and who attended.

Considering some of my memory slips, I was relieved to find that I definitely was there.

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