Feargal Sharkey: Why I’m backing The Times Clean It Up campaign
The former pop star says the government’s approach on water pollution has failed
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Narrated by Feargal Sharkey
When I was ten years old I stood on the banks of a river in Northern Ireland and caught my first little wild brown trout. My heart never beat faster in its life. It ignited within me a passion that burns just as strongly to this day.
Fast forward 55 years and I’d become chairman of the oldest fly fishing club in the UK, the Amwell Magna Fishery. For almost 200 years it has had the River Lea’s last breeding population of wild brown trout, downstream from Hertford. They can trace their ancestors back 8,000 years to fish that swam down the Rhine.
We were watching that river be destroyed. That got me interested in talking to the Environment Agency (EA) and Thames Water. We tried to take the EA to the High Court. When the EA realised that this was getting serious we managed to resolve our issue at Amwell Magna quickly. And I’m grateful for that.
We are 60 ladies and gentlemen of a certain age that just want to go fishing on a Sunday morning, yet we have to go to these lengths simply to get government agencies to do the right thing.
I began to peel this onion and discovered a water industry that was clearly out of control, and a regulatory and political system that was incapable of policing it and overseeing it. I grew up in a world where if you see social injustice, you have to push back.
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So I opened up a Twitter account, with absolutely zero followers. And here we are a few years later, there’s literally hundreds of thousands of people listening to me, God bless them.
And God bless The Times for launching the Clean It Up campaign on water pollution. For calling and demanding that the government intervenes in a grown-up, orderly fashion to protect and nurture not only the Amwell Magna Fishery but, as it transpires, every single bloody river in the country. Every single one is polluted.
I am deeply grateful for The Times putting themselves up for this and being willing to take this battle on, because despite billions of words of rhetoric about the environment, all of it in this country has come to naught. Of the 23 environmental objectives the government set itself, every single one of them is failing.
I hope our politicians start holding the likes of the EA and Ofwat, the economic regulator for the industry, to account. Politicians need to completely, utterly restructure the whole environmental landscape of the water industry. The existing approaches have failed. We need to introduce real penalties and sanctions to hold directors of water companies to account.
We have a responsibility to those bloody poor trout to ensure they’ll still be here in another 8,000 years, long after we’ve left this planet.
(As told to Adam Vaughan)
The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean It Up campaign.
