Affluence for the Few, Effluents for You

Among the great advantages of Britishness is automatic world-beating status in everything ever; and among the great advantages of beating the world is that one does not have to pay one's troops. Over the course of the pandemic, this fact of life has been borne in upon health and social care workers as never before, with increasingly impossible burdens paid off in applause, rah-rah, and wage increases of the negative persuasion. Now that the hated NHS is practically down for the count and waiting only for the Blairite vultures to take credit for its final dissolution, it looks as if the Environment Agency is next in line for treatment. Staff have been ordered not to bother about the less serious categories of pollution; which means, of course, that a greater number of such incidences will be left in peace to become serious, whereupon they will be tackled with resources which will have become even more inadequate through having to deal with increasingly severe problems in ever growing numbers on a budget shortened by the need to bail out fossil fuel corporations and subsidise frequent fliers. Eventually the National Johnson or his successor will proclaim the Environment Agency unfit for purpose, and will efficientise its administration by handing it to BP or Shell, once the country's rivers have attained an appropriate level of Britishness.