CALLED TO ORDURE
COME and visit my beautiful constituency where the rivers are filled with floating turds! That, broadly, was the message of a parliamentary debate on water quality. MPs dilated about filth in their rivers and lakes while at the same time trying to attract tourists to their area.
The debate was opened by Monmouth’s Catherine Fookes (Lab), who described joys of the Borders such as kayaking in the Wye, swimming in the Usk, admiring kingfishers and heron and… dodging toxic phosphate and algae. One moment she was waxing bucolic, the next she was on about “biodiversity loss and the collapse of the whole web of life”. One moment she said “rivers know no boundaries”, the next she was telling Hereford’s Jesse Norman that the Sunak government’s funding of around £35m for the Wye could not be honoured because Tories “failed to consult Wales”.