It took a sewage-plagued Boat Race to do it, but people can now see the appalling state of England’s water industry and waterways
Fire up a Chariots of Fire-style theme tune for the speech of the defeated Oxford captain in last Saturday’s Boat Race, beamed edifyingly around the world: “We had a few guys go down pretty badly with E coli,” declared Lenny Jenkins (the university’s boat club itself says it can’t be that specific on precisely what caused the gut-rot). Having shared a few of the nauseating details, Jenkins concluded: “It would be a lot nicer if there wasn’t as much poo in the water.” Yup, a country that once painted a quarter of the world pink now regrettably advertises itself as mostly brown – encircled by its own effluent and pumping it furiously through its river veins just to be sure. As metaphors go, it is on the nose in all senses.
And so to Thames Water, steward of the river on which that internationally famous race is rowed – a firm that is £18bn in deliriously structured debt, has had to be extensively threatened to spend so much as 30p on infrastructure investment, spent years being used as a cash cow for shareholders, and has pumped human waste into the Greater London area of the river for almost 2,000 hours already this year. Despite this rapacious shareholder-facing culture, its current foreign investors have now apparently judged it to be “uninvestable”. Thames Water’s relatively new CEO, Chris Weston, must be struck by that feeling that plagued Tony Soprano. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” the mobster judged. “I came too late for that – I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
