South West Water is claiming it has no legal obligation to keep rivers and seawater clean of sewage in its defence against a Devon swimmer who is taking the water company to court.
Jo Bateman, who attempts to swim every day off the coast of Exmouth, is taking legal action against South West Water, claiming its frequent sewage discharges into the sea have taken away her legal right to a public “amenity”.
However, in its defence to Ms Bateman’s claim, seen by i, the water firm states no one has a legal right to swim in the sea.
Pretty sure no one has the legal right to dump sewage in the sea either but go off I guess?
That used to be the case, mostly because the EU had rules about that. Then Brexit happened and dumping of sewage prohibitions were one of the first to be tossed on the bonfire of rules. And joy was in the corprate greedy shriveled heart.
Pretty sure there is no legal right not to dump menure on the guys face
There definitely is a way to find out
It’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence.
The sooner we start tarring, feathering and shunning these corporate parasites the sooner we can go back to a decent society.
Take the CEO and board members, tar and feather them, then throw them into the spot they dump their shit.
The public has no legal obligation to provide soap.
Hear that boys? Air is not an unalienable right! starts dumping all the fun pool chemicals into some building lobbie’s indoor fountain
I respect where you’re coming from but you’ve got to remember that the lobby is on private property so you will get fucked to the full extent of the law.
If only public property was protected as fiercely as private property.
Geev dese peepul ayuh!
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I’m going to assume all the comments are calls to violence and the mods and chicken shit cowards
You are correct. Memes about guillotines and the like.
Mods are cowards and bootlickers, must be from reddit lol.
Yeah that seems to be the mod style here. Violence can be done to people in real life, but talking about how violence should be done back is unacceptable.
In cases like this, I favour the kind of poetic justice that only irony can deliver - leaving them strapped down to be waterboarded by one of their sewage outlets seems like a good option.
Title sounds like the fucking onion
Well, Nestlé argues that people don’t actually have a right to have access to clean water to live, so that doesn’t seem farfetched at all…
A clean environment should be everyone’s public amenity.
In instances like this you’d think a Monarchy would have strong words about corporations polluting the land.
But you wont because they are worthless billionaire fucks. All of them deserve to be eaten.
To be fair, the monarch in the UK is mostly a figurehead. To his credit (and I am far from a monarchist), Charles has been advocating for environmental causes for a very long time. Sometimes stupidly, but he does actually give a shit. I just don’t know that he has the power to do anything about it and the Tories certainly don’t care.
I don’t think he can dictate laws, but he can unilaterally dissolve parliament and force an election (same as other commonwealth countries, the queen did that to Australia back in 1975). So if it’s a big enough issue, he technically could use that as a threat, though it would be a pretty nuclear option.
I don’t know that this particular event, as heinous as it may be, warrants such an action. That should be reserved for, for example, parliament trying to side with Putin on Ukraine.
Yeah, the 1975 incident was because the Tories allowed the government to shut down because they refused to pass a budget. The speaker kicked out the PM, appointed a temporary one, passed the budget, then dissolved parliament entirely. However, the mere threat can sometimes be enough.
That’s the PR line but it’s just propaganda.
I’m talking about Charles, not Elizabeth. Charles has famously worked for environmental causes for a very long time. He’s often an idiot about it and supports misguided causes, but he’s not in favor of this sort of pollution. He does have to pay fealty to Sunak’s government though. He’s not going to go against any of their major policy initiatives even if he doesn’t agree with them.
Also, that link doesn’t say anything about environmental laws as far as I can tell.
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Even if that were true, that firm still has no right to dump sewage in the sea
There are two ways to think about rights: there are legal rights and then there are human rights. Legal rights are conferred by some piece of legal document (legislation, constitution or common law) that a person is able to seek legal redress if their right has been revoked or diminished. Then there are human rights - what we as individual humans believe that each humans should expect as a basic right. The two are not always aligned, predominately because human rights vary greatly from one person’s interpretation to the next.
I think what the company is probably (accurately) arguing is that there is no legal right to swim in the UK, as no specific document states this with any specificity, so the complainant isn’t due compensation or redress of behaviour under the law. This is what the courts will examine as they are the interpreters of law but not the creators of law.
Now, does she have a human right to swim there free of sewage? I damn well think so, and I don’t think that would be a controversial opinion either. The problem is that what we think the law should be and what it is are often different, because legislation can’t represent every view simultaneously. There’s no law that could be drafted that makes forced birthers and pro choice people agree - someone will always lose out.
All of this is to say that while fighting this in court is a shitty thing to do (pun very much intended), it makes sense based upon the way our legal system is set up. There is no incentive for private business to respect rights that are not legally conferred, but there is a financial incentive to do the ‘cheaper and technically legal’ thing. Until we overhaul our legal systems to be inherently protective rather than inherently exploitative, this behaviour will continue.
There’s no legal document because nobody was dumb enough to think that in the first place. If you have to write a law for everything people are allowed to do because some twat wants to argue in bad faith, then the legal system has no basis in reality. In fact, if that were the case, then there is a chicken/egg problem with laws in the first place.
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In my mind, this story equates to life as a human being on this planet, in general.
Its added that even during the peak summer holiday season, South West Water and other firms have no duty to meet certain water quality standards.
“woah, woah, we’re a sewage company, we dump sewage. we’re not a clean water company. So what duty could we possibly have to dump sewage in a responsible manner?”
The defence states: “Even during the bathing season, there is no absolute right to swim each day.”
“you also don’t have an absolute right to walk on a public road, that’s where we’ll be dumping sewage next”
South West Water said it is the responsibility of the Government and the EA to ensure clean water, not the water companies that manage the nation’s rivers and coastline.
“Not our job to clean water, you want the Government. We’re just supposed to manage the water near the shore, so we dump all the sewage about a foot past where our jurisdiction stops. See? no problem!”
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Do they actually have a privately owned water supply in the UK?
Yes. Thatcher sold it off in '89, and since then the private monopolies have accumulated ~£60bn of debts and paid out ~£58bn in dividends. Now they’re arguing with the regulator that they should be allowed to pay out more dividends, increase customer fees by 40% and not have to pay as much in fines for dumping raw sewage because otherwise the companies are “uninvestable” and they won’t be able to raise the money to pay their debts and will collapse.
The water infrastructure was nationalised decades ago. Each reason has a single private company that maintains the pipes, supply, treatment etc. to everyone in that area. Being private companies, the execs have been getting massive bonuses while dumping raw sewage into public waterways recently. And why? Because as someone else here said: after Brexit, the government got rid of the environmental laws saying they couldn’t. And when you’re a monopoly in your area, are you going to spend money on treating water you don’t have to, or give that money to the shareholders?
It’s a fucking disgrace, a lot of people should go to prison for it and the whole system should be renationalised. But then people in government would lose money, and we can’t have that now, can we?
The water infrastructure was nationalised decades ago.
Just another of Milk Snatcher Maggie Thatcher’s little poison pills.
And yes, it should all be renationalised. They haven’t kept up with demand at any point.
Another example is Severn Trent.
They were releasing so much shit into the local nature reserve, that they have actually had to do something about it.
And that something is “building a big pipe so they can dump it directly into the Trent.” They’ve already hacked down a load of trees to make room for it.
Before:
After:
Even to an American where we have tons of privatized utilities this is a bit shocking to me. I haven’t really heard of privately owned water companies before. Although my region is a bit more into public ownership than most I guess. We have private gas supply and private internet but other utilities are public.
Predictably, those two are fucking awful and the other services run just fine. But the next town over has private electricity and it’s a total disaster.
I can see why Thatcher has such a poor reputation now.
