Boris Johnson’s Brexit legacy: Rivers of sh*t
Rivers of Shit: Boris Johnson couldn’t be bothered to think about the details of his Brexit, and now the UK is suffering shortages of materials including those used to clean sewage. So partially-cleaned and harmful crap is going directly into our rivers.
As with so many of his choices, Boris Johnson’s decision not to bother with finicky little details has let him down again.
And now his detractors – including This Site – are likening him to another Conservative Party ‘character’: Enoch Powell.
Back in the 1960s, Powell warned against wide-scale immigration with a speech named after its strongest image: Rivers of Blood.
Now, after Brexit removed the UK from the EU’s ‘free movement’ rule, it seems our borders have been closed to much more than human beings.
A shortage of chemicals that are used to treat effluent means the government has relaxed restrictions and polluters will be allowed to dump potentially harmful sewage directly into the UK’s rivers, making them dirty, dangerous, disease-ridden… Rivers of Shit.
I make no apology for the offensive word. Boris Johnson is an offensive creature and his name deserves to be linked with it.
Here’s The Independent with the story Johnson probably wishes he could flush away:
The government has given polluters the green light to dump risky sewage that has not been properly cleaned into rivers and the sea as Brexit and Covid disrupt normal water treatment.
In recent weeks some businesses have found it more difficult to get hold of water treatment chemicals because of supply chain disruption at ports blamed primarily on Britain’s departure from the EU.
The Environment Agency this week said companies struggling to get hold of the required chemicals would be allowed to “discharge effluent without meeting the conditions” of their permits, which normally require water to be treated by a multi-step process.
Companies should “resume use of chemicals to treat effluent as soon as is practicable”, the agency said. The regulatory relaxation will last until at least the end of the year, with an extension possible.
“This wasn’t on the side of the bus was it?” commented Julie Atkinson on Twitter, referring to Johnson’s controversial campaign bus in the run-up to the EU referendum, which claimed leaving the bloc would provide huge advantages to the UK.
No, it wasn’t – but it could get inside your children, or even you, if you aren’t careful.
“Welcome to Boris Johnson’s “golden age,” tweeted Peter Stefanovic – although I wonder if “golden” is the right description for the stuff being pumped into our waters as I type these words.
Kids have been known to play in rivers – I know they do, here in Mid Wales, even when they’re told not to – and the relaxation of water treatment rules means it is possible that they will ingest potentially disease-carrying waste because of Boris Johnson’s decisions.
You may hope that they won’t, or that it won’t make a difference – after all, water companies broke the rules to discharge raw sewage into UK rivers no fewer than 400,000 times last year alone. That’ll be Tory “light-touch” regulation for you!
This Writer fears it may be a forlorn hope.
'Rivers of Shit' should be Johnson's political epitaph. If the deaths and the squalor and the gleeful plundering and the hunger and the hate and the hopelessness had not been quite enough, the rivers of shit surely should help the decision-making process along.
Rivers of shit.
— simon maginn (@simonmaginn) September 7, 2021
If not his epitaph, it should become his nickname. His forerunner became Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell, after all.
So it is only right that he should be known as Boris “Rivers of Shit” Johnson.
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Cameron was no better – “the Greenest government ever”, quickly followed by, “get rid of all this Green crap”. Never trust a Tory. They’ve also been slaughtering Badgers, a protected species, for years. Tories hate Nature.
All that untreated waste needs to be offloaded outside number 10 Downing Street because this is the only way that little fascist dictator duck johnson would recognise he is responsible for causing this environmental disaster!
Well done little fascist dictator duck for ensuring all the Water Companies and Waste Disposal ones now have legal right to pollute our rivers with hazardous and dangerous waste!! And don’t forget reason is because little england arrogantly decided it was far better to leave the EU!!
The most costly and stupid action of the fascist tories but never mind little fascist duck johnson won’t have to suffer pollution on his doorstep and neither will he or his greedy fascist criminal cronies suffer any health effects because they’ll ensure it will be us peasants who will suffer from all that untreated waste being literally dumped in our rivers!