Feargal Sharkey mentions Jo Batemen in his latest comment in The Times today

Feargal Sharkey 

All I wanted to do was go fishing and yet here I was standing on the steps of a courthouse in Cardiff. It had actually come to this.

Britain, I’m afraid, must face the humiliating reality that not only is every river in England polluted but also the UK’s entire population of Atlantic salmon has been placed on the endangered species list.

Our magnificent salmon has joined the black rhino, mountain gorilla and tiger — animals whose futures are threatened by the very existence of man. It’s no longer some fuzzy issue of indifference perpetrated in a distant, misty foreign land. It is happening right here, today, in our own backyard. As a nation we are committing ecocide.

Whether it be agriculture or the water industry, chicken farms or sewage, the political oversight and regulation of the environment, especially of our rivers, has failed. Those responsible must be held accountable, must be made to atone, must be made to put things right. It is all of those reasons that make the Clean It Up campaign so important.

As we celebrate the first anniversary of the campaign, we can look back with enormous pride at what has been achieved, what has been delivered. Yet there is still so much more to do. We must continue to drive forward towards success. And that is what brought me to the courthouse in Cardiff this past week.

River Action, a charity of which I am vice-chairman, has decided that enough is enough. We are not prepared to allow the mediocrity and incompetence of bureaucracy to dictate this country’s future. To create a world in which the retired NHS worker Jo Bateman feels that she personally has to take legal action against a water company to get it to stop dumping sewage on to the beach where she swims; to force the regulator to act, to do its job, to uphold the law. That is why River Action is taking the government and the Environment Agency to court.

To be clear, this is not just about trying to protect today’s environment. It’s bigger than that, more powerful than that. As a nation we should be compelled to safeguard the future of our children’s children, the world they will inherit, and I for one am utterly determined to ensure that we provide them with a legacy that is befitting of our own existence.