Clean water and rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey meets Rosie Wrighting on the bridge over the River Ise in Geddington, Northamptonshire
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00:00This is the village that I grew up in, so I have many many memories of, you can see there,
00:07there's little slides that go down and playing in these boards and after 14 years of Conservatives
00:15our riverways are quite literally a mess. They have pumped water into rivers like this one and
00:24still there are children playing here in the summers. When I was looking at the sites where
00:30sewage has been dumped in Ketching this is our second highest site in this river here,
00:36so on a personal level it breaks my heart to see this happen with our waterways and if I'm lucky
00:42enough to be elected on the 4th of July I look forward to working with you, your campaign and
00:48My name's Fergal and here I am talking about poo on a bridge.
00:59I've had number one records, I've run some of the biggest record companies on the planet,
01:04I retired 12 years ago and here I am standing on a bridge talking about poo.
01:11Ironically enough if we're standing in the middle of a river not unlike this one
01:16with a little trout in it treating me with utter contempt refusing to indulge me by biting onto
01:22the end of my fly line and holding on for two minutes and while I was standing there
01:28and I guarantee you people in this river have seen this, they might not have realised what
01:32they were looking at but they have, the ugly underbelly of the sewage system came down in a
01:38little flotilla and if everybody will forgive me I can't find a delicate way to say this
01:44we are talking about used sanitary products, used male contraceptive products and any number of
01:52wet wipes in various states of being torn apart and disintegrated. That made me curious and angry
02:00and it is that curiosity and anger has led me here. Now to pick up what Rosie just said
02:06even in this constituency last year Anglia Motors spent over 3,800 hours dumping sewage
02:14into local rivers and a matter of a couple of feet that way at the sewage works last year
02:20723 hours worth of sewage was dumped out of that sewage works into the river
02:28and there's no need for it, it's illegal, it shouldn't be happening. There's now not a single
02:34river anywhere in England that is not polluted, every single river and one of the largest sources
02:41of that pollution is the water industry and in fact I checked this morning on the way up
02:47this particular stretch of river is now categorised by the Environment Agency
02:53as being in poor ecological condition i.e. that is bottom of the list but one
03:00and that grading tells me that this river is for all intentional purposes ecologically dead.
03:08Now I can see it already by looking at this thing here and I did notice the Ford as soon as I got
03:13out of the car and I already knew playground, Ford, summer, hell I'd be in that river. I wouldn't let
03:21my kid or anyone near that river. I would ban my kids from getting anywhere near. That's how bad this is.