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UK Politics - Put your mask in the bin and hug your granny


john

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But see what is really going on here.

A perfectly accurate and somewhat worrying story that the government has relaxed the rules on the release of sewerage into the environment. Backed up by a link to the government's own website where this relaxation is described in detail.

And the response is to attack the newspaper it is reported in as being left wing (true enough), but then go to to implicitly imply that this means that the story can be ignored. No attempt at all to address the story on its merits. I call that blind partisanship at best.


Incidentally, I see that the government website gives the justifications for the relaxation as:

Quote
  • the UK’s new relationship with the EU
  • coronavirus (COVID-19)
  • other unavoidable failure in the supply chain

 

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11 minutes ago, A wilding said:

And the response is to attack the newspaper it is reported in as being left wing (true enough), but then go to to implicitly imply that this means that the story can be ignored. No attempt at all to address the story on its merits. I call that blind partisanship at best.

It was a response to Zorral baiting HoI by saying “I’ll bet you’re about to say something about The Guardian”, the actual story hasn’t been discussed since the first post.

I don’t think it’s particularly serious, and the bias comes in through the fact that they reported it at all (BBC don’t have the story that I can see), as anti-Brexit stuff gets clicks. A kind of macro-version of why posters share the stories here; anti-Brexit stuff sells well here too.

But no water companies have taken them up on the offer yet, and the environmental agency are fully on board and monitoring that it’s still safe, and the UK’s water laws are very stringent on the global scale - I work for Thames Water (though not in sewage) and holy fuck, you would not believe how rigorously we check drinking water. 

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Thanks for checking the Thames water! The air people have done a great job , too. You can see it when you visit every decade or two. First visiting had black snot from breathing in, and then it was 90% fixed. I would love to go again when the vax situation settles. I’ve had such a good time there:) I liked Browns, Harrods for afternoon tea.

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First posting this story is dismissed because supposedly it's in the Guardian, therefore not to be considered because the informer only reads the Guardian and the NYT.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-08/u-k-water-firms-allowed-to-dump-sewage-due-to-chemical-shortage

Then the posting of the story is labeled  'baiting' of those who are dismissing it because of who posted it.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/sewage-dumping-rules-relaxed-amid-brexit-induced-chemicals-shortage-289204/

Then, finally the matter of the story isn't addressed because dumping sewage untreated the recommended number of times isn't a matter that matters.  No problem.  Nobody cares.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/19567722.brexit-sewage-can-dumped-rivers-sea-chemical-shortage/

https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/environment/953734/the-state-of-englands-rivers

Yet there are no links provided to show this isn't a problem, only wailing that posting the story and concluding this will be dismissed is mean because reasons.

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15 hours ago, Zorral said:

 

Counting down now the time before ordered to stop reading the Guardian.  :D (though will not receive suggestions as to what to read instead that carries all the good and useful and factual and significant information)

@Zorral you wrote the above, stop trying to rewrite history. Nobody was dismissing the article, just nobody cared about it. You can’t force people to be interested in what you are saying if they aren’t.

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11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

...and the UK’s water laws are very stringent on the global scale 

Well, either the UK's water companies are pissing all over the UK's water laws, or the UK's water laws are unfit for purpose and need to be changed.

The waters in this country - rivers, estuaries, and beaches, are in a terrible fucking state.

Pollution is rampant. Industrial sites, farms, and water companies are dumping waste and raw sewage with impunity.

I would share some links, but who gives a shit, eh?

 

 

 

 

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15 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I would share some links, but who gives a shit, eh?

Well, the water companies do, obviously.
Or at least, they "spill" or "accidentally release" it anyway. The fines are just considered a cost of doing business, and significantly less than the cost of actually dong the job required.


As for "and no-one's taken up the government's offer yet" - I think we all hope it stays that way, but it doesn't change that the government has made the offer; nor did it age well when the same argument was proposed that allowing roaming charges didn't matter because no-one had taken them up on it - until they did.

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33 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

Well, the water companies do, obviously.
Or at least, they "spill" or "accidentally release" it anyway. The fines are just considered a cost of doing business, and significantly less than the cost of actually dong the job required.

And quite apart from all the pollution, water companies lose about a quarter of all their water due to ancient, leaky infrastructure that they steadfastly refuse to fix.

Gosh, this privatization lark has really worked out well for the British people, wot?

 

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11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

It was a response to Zorral baiting HoI by saying “I’ll bet you’re about to say something about The Guardian”, the actual story hasn’t been discussed since the first post. 

I agree that Zorral was baiting, but it was so clear that a deflection like that was coming anyway. Pot and kettle. The boot is so often on the other foot, and when it is, I at least do try to address the argument, even when I allow myself a sideswipe at the deflection as well.

 

11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t think it’s particularly serious, and the bias comes in through the fact that they reported it at all (BBC don’t have the story that I can see), as anti-Brexit stuff gets clicks. A kind of macro-version of why posters share the stories here; anti-Brexit stuff sells well here too.

But no water companies have taken them up on the offer yet, and the environmental agency are fully on board and monitoring that it’s still safe, and the UK’s water laws are very stringent on the global scale - I work for Thames Water (though not in sewage) and holy fuck, you would not believe how rigorously we check drinking water. 

We may have acquaintance in common then.

While I agree that the UK has historically been very good at water quality, and has long had some of the cleanest rivers in Europe, my understanding is that the recent trend has been for steadily more and worse leaks of sewerage and a general decline. And yes a general feeling that the companies consider it cheaper just to pay the fines when they are caught.

Thames Water is definitely not the worst offender though.

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6 minutes ago, A wilding said:

While I agree that the UK has historically been very good at water quality, and has long had some of the cleanest rivers in Europe

I'm sorry, but this is simply not true.

Panorama did an exposé on our polluted rivers a few months ago. The report focused on the biggest polluters - factories, farms, and the water companies themselves.

Water UK responded by blaming individuals for flushing wet wipes down the bog. 

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Sure things seem to have been going downhill slowly since not long after privatization. (Which laughably was justified by how it would result in much needed investment in the system.) And runoff from the increasing amounts of pesticides used by farmers has also become an issue.

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Just to respond generally to a few posters; the whole sewage system is constantly in a very changeable state - usage shifted massively during lockdown as people were far more likely to be using their toilets at home outside of cities than inside. Heavy rainfall changes the situation drastically. And yes, ‘fatbergs’ (formed of wet wipes and various oil, fat, etc) clog up pipes which again means sewage needs diverting elsewhere. So water companies shift all this waste around to different sites as best they can to manage the flow. 

Sometimes a bunch of these factors combine and you have no choice but to release it to the waterways, after chemical treatment. There’s a whole myriad of treatments that get applied, and one particular one that sometimes gets applied (depending on what other processes have been used) uses ferric sulphate to reduce algae levels. I’m seeing a lot of articles suggesting that all the rules have been ripped up and raw sewage will be dumped in rivers, which just isn’t true. It could be ‘untreated’ in that this one stage has been missed, but it absolutely isn’t completely untreated. 

And yes water companies lose some water through leaky pipes, but that’s an ever improving situation and they don’t ‘refuse’ to replace them, there’s just 350,000km of them so it’s not happening overnight.

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37 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

And yes water companies lose some water through leaky pipes, but that’s an ever improving situation and they don’t ‘refuse’ to replace them, there’s just 350,000km of them so it’s not happening overnight.

Lol. Water was privatised thirty years ago.

And it's not just 'some' water that is lost. Almost a quarter of all water is lost due to a lack of investment by these vultures. 

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Going back to the subject of news outlets, and the lies they tell, here is a pretty good example of the how the right wing press tells lies to gullible morons in order to stoke up division and hatred, with a little help from the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

You may have seen the likes of Farage and Lozza whining about this recently. The prats.

Churchill Charity Sparks Tsunami Of Lying

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Two years ago, the trustees of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, in consultation with hundreds of the Trust’s fellows, agreed a change of name, to The Churchill Fellowship. This reflected what the organisation, set up after Churchill’s death in 1965, was about - awarding fellowships for study abroad, and bringing the knowledge obtained back to the UK for the benefit of the communities in which they live. There were no complaints.

Until the Murdoch Sun heard about the renaming, and then all hell broke loose - two years late, and somehow missing that Churchill’s family approved the move. Rupe’s downmarket troops start relatively gently, with “A CHARITY set up to honour Sir Winston Churchill sparked a ‘woke’ storm by changing its name and erasing him from its website”.

Then the lies begin. “Its volunteers accuse the trust of ‘re-writing history’”. But here a problem enters: The Churchill Fellowship has no volunteers. So the quote from “One source said” is a lie, as is “One outraged source told The Sun”, and “Volunteers at the charity accuse the trust of ‘re-writing history’ and pandering to ‘cancel culture’”.

And the Sun was on hand to obediently take dictation. “BORIS Johnson today slammed a charity's ‘absurd, misguided and wrong’ decision to scrub all trace of his hero Winston Churchill from their website”. But that hadn’t happened. So more lying, then. And soon the lying rather got out of hand, as the pundits and outrage merchants cashed in.

The deeply unpleasant Dan Wootton was in their vanguard: “I am boiling with rage today at news the one woman who should be fighting against the loony left's bid to piss on the reputation of Churchill is the person attempting to cancel him”. Yes, it’s all “the brainchild of Julie Weston, the charity's £100,000-a-year chief executive”. So he’s lying as well.

Anyone else fancy a little whopper-telling? Gammon Broadcasting™ News (“Bacon’s News Channel”) would. Former Brexit Party Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage led the charge, backed up by a trio of nobodies - Colin Brazier, Andrew Doyle, and Patrick Christys. “We call it cancel culture but it's the virus of Marxism coming back” moaned Farage. “Winston Churchill has been cancelled” sneered Christys. Liars every one of them.

Fortunately, the Churchill family has put the record straight, as reported by the Guardian: Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, asserted “I and the rest of my family, fully and unreservedly, support the remarkable work of the Churchill Fellowship”.

Also, “The changes were overseen by the charity’s trustees headed by Jeremy Soames, another grandson of Churchill”. But the lies have already taken hold. And that’s not good enough.

 

But yeah, it's The Guardian who cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

 

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1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

Bear in mind that the below is based on the US idea of where the political centre is (so AP and Reuters as reporters of pure fact and no spin, are considered leftist, whilst the Mail is considered dead-centre).

 

 

I think you mean left-ish. AP and Reuters are almost center on the chart. It is curious that near pure fact reporting that one assumes is very reliable in being actual fact is even a little bit to the left on any chart. I thought the famous refrains from those on the right is that facts don't care about feelings and facts can't be racist. Well surely it therefore follows that facts cannot have a political bias. Though alternative facts surely do.

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