Danger to life weather warning as thunderstorms set to hit England

Parts of southern England are set to be battered by torrential rain on Saturday which could cause “significant” flooding and a danger to life, the Met Office said.

An amber warning for thunderstorms has been issued for between 4am and 11am spanning major towns and cities including London, Brighton, Portsmouth, Chelmsford, St Albans and Cambridge.

Forecasters have warned of sudden flooding in roads and homes with some more remote communities at risk of being cut off, while delays to train and bus services are also likely.

Power cuts could also occur and buildings are at risk of damage from floodwater, lightning strikes, hail and strong winds.

It is one of several weather warnings for thunderstorms issued across the country.

On Friday, two yellow warnings are in place with one covering much of Yorkshire and the north east of England from 11am to 8pm on Friday. The second will come into place at 9pm until 11:49pm in London and the south east.

On Saturday, two yellow warnings will be in place alongside the more severe amber alert. Most of England will be covered by a yellow warning from midnight to 9pm. Eastern Scotland is also facing a yellow warning from 4pm until midday on Sunday.

A further warning for the south west of England will also come into place at midday on Sunday and remain until 3am on Monday.

The downpours will be fuelled by warm and humid airmass moving across the country over the coming days, the Met Office said.

Met Office Chief Meteorologist Jason Kelly, said: “Within the warm and humid airmass we will potentially see temperatures reaching 30°C or more for parts of eastern England by Friday, with very warm and muggy conditions continuing into the weekend in parts of central and southern England.”

Looking ahead to next week, the unsettled pattern is expected to continue, with showers and thunderstorms at times, although some drier, brighter interludes are also likely. Temperatures will be near normal or warm for the time of year, depending on sunshine.

By midweek, conditions may begin to settle from the west, though eastern areas could still see showers. Temperatures are expected to be near or slightly above normal, with warmth in sunnier areas.

It comes as Southern Water has become the latest company to bring in a hosepipe ban, to protect rare chalk stream habitat, as England battles exceptionally dry weather.

The company said restrictions on hosepipes for activities such as watering gardens, filling paddling pools or washing cars would come in for households in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight from Monday.

It is the latest announcement by water companies bringing in hosepipe bans in response to the driest start to the year since 1976 for England.

Rainfall across England was 20 per cent less than the long-term average for June, which was also the hottest on record for the country, with two heatwaves driving unusually high water demand, the Environment Agency has said.

Drought was declared in the East and West Midlands on Tuesday, with the region joining swathes of northern England in being impacted by the lack of rainfall.

Russian spies who ‘targeted Britain in sustained campaign’ sanctioned

Britain has hit more than a dozen Russian spies with a wave of sanctions, targeting those it accused of running a “sustained campaign” of malicious activity against the UK.

The Foreign Office named 18 officers from Russian spy agency the GRU, as well as hitting three of its units with measures aimed at cracking down on Vladimir Putin’s increasing aggression abroad.

It said the military intelligence officers targeted were “responsible for spreading chaos and disorder on Putin’s orders”, and included those who had targeted the family of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

The officers sanctioned had targeted a device belonging to Mr Skripal’s daughter Yulia with malicious malware known as X-Agent five years before GRU attempted to murder them in Salisbury with the deadly Novichok nerve agent.

The units are also accused of conducting a prolonged campaign of cyberattacks across Europe, including in Britain, aimed at destabilising the continent and undermining democratic institutions.

“GRU spies are running a campaign to destabilise Europe, undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and threaten the safety of British citizens,” foreign secretary David Lammy said.

He added: “The Kremlin should be in no doubt: we see what they are trying to do in the shadows and we won’t tolerate it. That’s why we’re taking decisive action with sanctions against Russian spies.”

On 15 March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Unit 26165 carried out online reconnaissance on civilian bomb shelters in Mariupol, southern Ukraine and in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, the Foreign Office said.

One of the targets was the Mariupol theatre. Civilians sheltering inside from Russian bombs had painted the word “children” outside in the hopes they would be spared.

But the next day, the theatre was hit by Russian airstrikes, killing about 600 people, including children, according to an Associated Press investigation.

In 2013, officers from the same unit had targeted the daughter of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal with malware, designed to harm or infiltrate computer systems, the foreign ministry said.

In 2018, Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in the English city of Salisbury, in an attack the British government said was organised by Russian intelligence. The Skripals survived the attack on British soil but a woman, Dawn Sturgess, was killed after her boyfriend stumbled across the poison in a perfume bottle.

The sanctions also targeted the Africa Initiative, which the Foreign Office said employed Russian intelligence officers to carry out information operations in Africa, including undermining public health programmes and destabilising various countries.

Russia’s campaign of sabotage and disruption across Europe ranges from cyberattacks and propaganda to arson and attempted assassination. Mr Lammy said: “Putin’s hybrid threats and aggression will never break our resolve. The UK and our allies’ support for Ukraine and Europe’s security is ironclad.”

More than 70 different attacks have been attributed to Russia by Western officials since the invasion.

The military intelligence units sanctioned on Friday also targeted foreign aid to Kyiv, ports, infrastructure and border crossings as well as technology companies, the Foreign Office said.

Although targeting GRU officers with sanctions is likely to have limited effect, the ministry said the goal is to raise awareness of Russia’s campaign and raise the cost to people working for its services, including making it harder for them to travel.

I was hit with a superinjunction – I know democracy dies in darkness

I was once smacked with a superinjunction… and lived to tell the full Kafkaesque tale. So I have a lot of sympathy for The Independent and other media organisations who, for nearly two years, have been forced to sit on a story that the British state didn’t want told.

My own experience of being gagged involved an unappetising company called Trafigura, which had been caught dumping toxic chemicals off west Africa in 2006. The company had shelled out more than £30m in compensation and legal costs to 30,000 inhabitants of Abidjan in Ivory Coast who claimed to have been affected by the dumping.

Trafigura was keen to suppress the findings of an internal report that could have proved embarrassing. So it obtained an injunction to stop The Guardian from publishing it – and then, for good measure, a further injunction to prevent us from revealing the existence of the original injunction.

Welcome to superinjunctions, which were, for a while, sprayed around like legal confetti – often by errant footballers keen to keep their off-pitch escapades secret. The Trafigura case represented a novel application of the law, to silence investigative journalism – seemingly contradicting the only dictum about the courts that most people are familiar with: the principle that justice must be seen to be done.

Trafigura went one step further. When a Labour MP tabled a question about its use of a superinjunction, its lawyers, the unlovely company Carter-Ruck, even warned newspapers that they would be in contempt of court if they dared mention this parliamentary intervention.

That was plainly ludicrous. Trafigura’s legal pitbulls had lost sight of the fact that people risked their liberty and their lives to fight for the right to report what their elected representatives say and do. The superinjunction collapsed like an undercooked souffle.

And here we are 16 years later, discovering that, for 683 days, a tiny handful of lawyers, judges, politicians and civil servants were stopping the press from telling the most extraordinary story of how a hapless MoD official caused a catastrophic data breach that put the lives of thousands of Afghans in peril.

The saga began in September 2023, when Mr Justice Knowles issued a gagging order contra mundum (against the world), forbidding anyone from revealing the leak, which named Afghans who had assisted the British forces in Kabul – and who might now be at risk of reprisals from the Taliban. The judge spoke in lukewarm terms about the importance of freedom of expression, but considered that a blanket gag was essential to give the MoD time to mitigate the harm.

Following that, a growing number of journalists became aware of the story, and another judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, held multiple hearings – many of them closed to outsiders – to decide for how long the injunction should hold. At one point, about a year ago, he thought enough was enough, but was overruled by the Court of Appeal.

It was only this week that the curtain was lifted and we were allowed to know that as many as 18,500 Afghans had secretly been flown to Britain at a cost variously estimated to be between £400m and £7bn (ie we don’t know). British spies and special forces soldiers were also among the tens of thousands of people potentially put at risk by the catastrophic Afghan data leak.

The clincher for Chamberlain was a risk assessment report commissioned by the current government from a retired civil servant, Paul Rimmer. Rimmer took a markedly different view of the ongoing risk and, said Chamberlain, “fundamentally undermined” the case for the gagging order to continue. And so it was that, at midday on Tuesday, the jaw-dropping nature of what had been going on was finally revealed.

Some might argue that, back in September 2023, there was a case for some kind of news blackout to give the authorities a chance to alert those most at risk, and to extricate as many people as possible. The question is, was it right to keep the gagging order in place for so long? Chamberlain clearly thought it was fine to discharge it a year ago. Was he right? Or was the MoD justified in arguing for more time?

The first thing to be said is that the state (in the form of governments and Whitehall) will, in such circumstances, always argue for more secrecy. They will say they are acting in the national interest. But history tells us that the government of the day can often not be trusted in its judgement of where the national interest lies.

In 1938, the government of the day attempted to use the Official Secrets Act to compel Duncan Sandys MP to disclose the source of his information about the state of anti-aircraft defences around London. Sandys later became defence minister.

Historians now take a different view of those who opposed appeasement in the 1930s. Also in the 1930s, the appeasing government condemned the “subversive” whistleblowers who were feeding Winston Churchill information about Britain’s readiness for war. “The damage done to the services far outweighs any advantage that may accrue,” raged a now-forgotten war minister. He was wrong; Churchill and his informants were right.

The government of the day tried in 1967 to prevent The Sunday Times, under its then editor Harold Evans, from publishing an accurate account of the case of former MI6 agent Kim Philby and his life as a double agent. The foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, having failed to prevent its publication, publicly accused Evans of being a traitor and of “giving the Russians a head start … for God’s sake, stop!”

It’s not just a British instinct. In 2004, George W Bush talked The New York Times out of running a series of articles that revealed that the US National Security Agency had been eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without a warrant. Bush told the editor: “You’ll have blood on your hands.” The editor spiked the articles.

So Mr Justice Chamberlain was right to be a little sceptical about what the state’s representatives were telling him during this two-year saga. As he pointed out, the potential sums of money involved (£7bn!?) and the sheer number of urgent migrants were entirely legitimate subjects for political debate.

Even more troubling is the fact that members of parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) were also kept in the dark. In June 2024, a Court of Appeal judge suggested that the ISC might be allowed access to the issue. But the lead KC for the MoD pooh-poohed the idea.

Lord Beamish, the ISC’s chair, said the decision not to keep his committee in the loop was “appalling”. He’s right. The ISC is a statutory committee intended to scrutinise the work of Britain’s spy agencies, including GCHQ, MI6 and MI5. Being told that the MoD doesn’t trust it with “certain pieces of information” calls into question the entire mechanism of oversight in the secret state. What else do the spooks not think they can be trusted to know?

Ironically, the seven media organisations – including The Independent – that were in on the secret by the time the injunction was finally discharged all behaved impeccably in not breathing a word. It’s a topsy-turvy world in which journalists can be trusted with knowing information that the ISC was denied.

Lord Beamish is right to be furious – and no doubt his committee will want answers. They’re not the only ones. There should be the fullest possible reckoning. As the saying goes, democracy dies in darkness.

Police confirm 10-year-old boy was killed in Somerset school bus crash

The child who died in a school bus crash in Somerset has been confirmed as a 10-year-old boy, Avon and Somerset Police said on Friday. He has not yet been named.

Police added that six other children and three adults, including the driver, remain in hospital.

Between 60 and 70 people were on board the bus, which was heading back to Minehead Middle School after a day trip for Year 5 classes to Exmoor Zoo.

The vehicle left the A396 at Cutcombe Hill near Minehead, on Thursday afternoon, sliding down a 20ft slope .

Formal identification has not yet been completed, but specially trained officers are supporting the boy’s next of kin.

Two children were taken to Bristol Royal Hospital for Children by air ambulance following the incident, while four other children and three adults remain in hospital in Somerset, a police spokesperson said.

The crash happened on the A396 at Cutcombe Hill, between Wheddon Cross and Timberscombe, at about 3.15pm on Thursday.

The vehicle left the road, overturned and came to rest about 20ft (six metres) from the roadway, down a steep slope.

An off-duty firefighter travelling behind the coach was able to start freeing passengers immediately.

Recovery of the vehicle and collision investigation are complex, and police expect the road to remain closed for a considerable time.

Minehead Middle School, which caters for pupils aged between nine and 14, and is five days away from the end of term, remained closed on Friday.

On Friday, a stream of people went to the school to pay respects, leaving floral tributes and messages at the gates. Dozens of bouquets, balloons and messages have been left at the school.

Many were visibly upset and could be seen hugging and supporting each other.

Speaking outside the school gates, the Rev Philip Butcher, the vicar of Minehead, said the community was in shock.

“It was absolutely numbing, there are no words to describe what happened yesterday,” he said.

“It’s an absolute tragedy, and one that’s still very much unfolding. We’re just standing firm with the school, with the families at this time, just to be with them in this time as a point of support.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “There are no adequate words to acknowledge the death of a child. All my thoughts are with their parents, family and friends, and all those affected.”

The driver of the coach is reported to be in a stable condition but has suffered “a number of injuries”.

In a statement, Chief Superintendent Mark Edgington said: “On behalf of the emergency services, I would like to thank the 24 volunteers from Exmoor Search and Rescue who carried out first aid triage at the rest centre and have rope and search skills.

“I also pass on thanks to the staff of the Rest and Be Thankful pub at Wheddon Cross, which opened its doors as the rest centre.

“Of course, we also recognise the efforts of Minehead Middle School, for keeping parents and carers informed and providing support to the school community during what is a difficult and distressing time for them all.”

The Epping ‘protests’ make me ashamed to admit I’m from Essex

I spent a long time being too embarrassed to admit I was from Essex. When I went to university, I used to tell people I was from “north-east London”, rather than admit to the county of my birth.

It feels silly to admit it, now, but I felt distinctly haunted by the typical “Essex girl” tropes, even at 18. When I met my then-boyfriend’s family in Bristol, I still remember that the first thing his dad said was to tease me by asking if I’d driven down the M4 in a clapped out Ford Fiesta.

White stilettos, orange fake tan and reality TV show The Only Way Is Essex (or “TOWIE”, to those in the know – and of course I went to school with half of the cast); we’ve long been the butt of the nation’s jokes, both on and off screen. Our unofficial royals are Gemma Collins and Joey Essex. Need I say more?

Thankfully, I grew out of that childish shame that leads you to reject where you come from – when people ask me where I’m from, I say “Essex” again. Except that right now, I’m seriously considering going back in the closet.

That’s because when I woke to news that “protests” had broken out in Epping – the place I used to go “out out” as a teen, the place I still meet old schoolfriends in for lunch, the place my relatives still live in – I felt deeply, deeply ashamed. Even more so when footage showed hordes of people clashing with police outside a hotel believed to be housing asylum seekers.

Essex Police said missiles were thrown at officers and the hotel, police vans and vehicles smashed, the high street brought to a standstill and one officer injured, while eight officers in total were assaulted – in what the force described as “extreme hostility from a large number of individuals”. Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Hooper described it as “selfish criminal behaviour” perpetuated by “a mindless minority who don’t give a damn about the hardworking, good people of Epping”.

He added: “Help us get them, because the people of Essex are proud people and these streets are ours.” He’s right. To my mind, these “protests” showcase the very worst of Essex. The worst of Britain, full-stop.

Depressingly, it’s not even an isolated incident. The first pathetic “protest” was reportedly planned in advance and took place on Sunday night, followed by further disruption on Thursday. The excuse? A 38-year-old resident there was accused, last week, of sexual assault.

Now, I have no idea about the alleged sexual assault case involving Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, who appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court earlier in the day. I don’t know the details, or the outcome. Neither do these “protesters”. But what I do know is that their behaviour helps no-one – least of all the alleged victim.

And what almost amuses me (except that it’s… not funny) is that I wrote only yesterday about the number of sexual assaults and incidents of harassment myself and my friends have experienced on the Tube – from being followed by “burping, farting men” to catcalls, groping and obscene gestures.

But what if I also repeat the sad fact that in almost every incident of male to female violence on public transport, not a single person steps in to help us – or to report it happening? How do people explain themselves for this utter failure to call out harassment when it’s actually happening right in front of them – to anyone, by anyone?

I took an unsavoury trawl through a local Facebook group, to see how people were reacting to the protests, but the ignorance was shocking.

Some attempted to excuse the behaviour in the name of “protecting kids”; while many blamed the government. Thankfully, there were also voices pointing out that thuggery isn’t welcome in the area. “So people not from Epping have gone to Epping to cause trouble”, one said. Another called it “disgusting, attacking the police” – and one long-term resident said this is “not the Epping l used to know and come from – this is NOT a protest, it’s DISGRACEFUL behaviour.”

Hear, hear. This is not the Essex I know, believe in – or want to be associated with. And if anyone asks, I’m from north-east London, again…

When my friends were facing cancer, a community of people stepped up

When I was younger, I used to worry incessantly about my parents getting cancer. I’d lay awake at night, ruminating on what would happen to my brother and I if they did. Who would support us? Thankfully, both are still cancer-free, well into their seventies.

However, now that I’m a parent myself, I worry about my children. Many people believe that cancer only really happens to people in old age, but that’s just not true. One beloved friend’s daughter died of leukaemia in 2020, aged just five; an unthinkable horror that changed the lives of everyone who knew her and her family.

And with Macmillan Cancer Support reporting that almost 3.5 million people in the UK are living with cancer, I also worry about my friends – parents themselves, their lives touched by cancer. One friend sat me down in our favourite local café, our toddlers playing at our feet, to break the news that she was about to undergo a double mastectomy. We cried together.

Another friend, Sarah, a single parent to two teenage girls, was diagnosed with breast cancer the day before we heard that King Charles had cancer, and a month before the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, announced her own diagnosis in March last year. It seemed like cancer was everywhere.

As a result, Sarah put 2024 on hold – she missed her daughter’s last sports day and last concert at primary school and had to find a whole new way of co-ordinating family life.

“I’m lucky in some ways that my children are teenagers, so they are able to look after themselves to some degree – but I’m also a single parent, so there are some things that they can’t do, or struggle with, due to their age,” she tells me.

“I have even set up multiple alarms on our Alexa reminding them to put their packed lunches in their bags or leave for school, just in case I can’t get up.”

Sarah says she thought she knew quite a lot about cancer prior to her diagnosis, but now admits she “really didn’t”. She explains: “There are so many terms and procedures to understand – stages and grades, not to mention over 100 different chemotherapy drugs.”

Sarah tells me about the exhausting cumulative effect of chemotherapy, which she endured every three weeks during her cancer treatment: “After the very first lot, I slept for a few hours and felt much better pretty quickly. For my last rounds, I slept for 48 hours solid and even days later, I needed to have a nap in the middle of the day and was in bed by 8pm.”

Sarah’s now finished chemotherapy and, a year on from her diagnosis, is turning 50. She’s throwing a huge party to celebrate not only the birthday milestone, but getting over this “annus horriblis” – a year she couldn’t have gotten through without the people around her.

“People can do so much for us when we are unwell – and I am forever grateful,” she says. “I’ve been really overwhelmed by the support that my friends have given me; from ferrying around my children to and from after-school events and sleepovers when things get bad, to my 75-year-old neighbour mowing the lawn. One friend popped round with a huge pot of pasta sauce and I even had a gift box from a recruiter at work.”

What talking to my strong, resilient friends about their cancer journeys has made me realise most, is the power of community: for when we receive the worst news imaginable, what we need is people around us to see us through. A community of other women: friends, school mums, neighbours.

They had people willing to make them food, pick up their children, go shopping for them or to just sit with them and listen. They had support when they decided to raise money for cancer support charities, when they did fundraisers such as hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

It takes a village to raise a child – and that village will be with you every step of the way when you need them most.

Find out how you can help raise vital funds by hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning. Sign up now on the Macmillan website

Macmillan Cancer Support, registered charity in England and Wales (261017), Scotland (SC039907) and the Isle of Man (604). Also operating in Northern Ireland.

Who will benefit the most from new rules about voter ID?

The announcement about giving the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds in all UK elections has obviously caused huge excitement, and some controversy. However, the experts say that the number of new voters will in practice be very small, and that it will make only a marginal difference to the result of a general election – because some won’t vote, and there’s no God-given law about them all voting Labour.

Much more significant are the new rules on voter ID. The range of acceptable documents will be widened to include, for example, bank cards. Whatever the advantage it might bestow on any particular party at an election, proponents say it will boost turnout, and engagement with the democratic process…

The government says its elections bill will allow people to use UK-issued bank cards as proof of identity, and of course, these do not usually carry an image of the user. In addition, there will be “more digital options to support voters and polling station staff, including allowing accepted IDs such as the Veteran Card and UK driving licence to be used at polling stations when they become available in digital format”.

The cynics say it is because it will benefit Labour disproportionately. Others say that, true or not, that’s less important than allowing people to vote, and that the threat of electoral fraud has been greatly exaggerated.

Historically, according to the Electoral Commission and the academics, there’s been little in Great Britain even in local elections, and it is virtually unknown in general elections. Where it has cropped up, such as in Tower Hamlets, it has been dealt with.

The counterclaim is that photo ID was brought in by the Conservatives in the last parliament in order to help them and to suppress the Labour vote. A point lost to history is that the 2019 Conservative manifesto did not specify “photo” ID as the preferred option. (Northern Ireland has needed photo ID for far longer, because of much more voter “personation”. Hence the local slogan “Vote early, vote often”.)

Probably in the hundreds of thousands, and maybe more. The polling company More in Common say that, on the basis of polling after the last election, more than 850,000 would have been turned away at the polling station for lack of ID, and – given that some returned – perhaps 400,000 lost their vote.

It affected voters from ethnic minority groups disproportionately: the poll suggested that 6.5 per cent of voters of colour were turned away from a polling booth at least once, compared with 2.5 per cent of white voters.

But of course, no one really has any idea how many voters didn’t even bother to go to the polls who wished to, because they knew they didn’t have the necessary ID – or they did but it had some minor discrepancy, such as a variation in their first name or the precise spelling of their surname.

Local council “greeters” posted outside polling stations may also have stopped people from entering the premises, and thus these would-be voters would have gone unnoticed by the local election officials or the Electoral Commission.

The government says that an increasingly automated voter registration system will also make it easier for people to register to vote, and will reduce the need for them to fill out their details across different government services on multiple occasions.

On balance, Labour, because of its relatively high vote among some ethnic minorities; but also, for that same reason, the Corbynite independents who took seats from Labour in strongly Muslim areas even in a strong year such as 2024. Reform UK might also see some benefit, because their vote is skewed towards more disadvantaged places, where turnouts are traditionally low. Automated registration among disaffected non-voters might give them a bit of a boost.

No. As with votes at 16, the numbers aren’t going to make that much of a difference, and in our present confused four- or five-party system, it’s hard to see anyone gaining a decisive advantage. And voting allegiances by age, class and ethnicity, for example, can shift over time anyway. But in a very close contest, who knows?

This seems to be another problem for turnout. The government says of last July: “Overall, 8 per cent of non-voters mentioned they did not vote because of an issue related to their postal vote (such as missing the deadline to apply, forms arriving late and forgetting to send their postal vote) – with this figure rising to 13 per cent in Scotland and Wales.”

The deterioration in the postal system has added fresh challenges to a method of voting many find essential, or more convenient. So the proposal is to change the deadline in Great Britain to apply for a postal vote, moving it from 11 to 14 working days before a poll, thereby providing more time between the application deadline and polling day.

This only became much of an issue in Britain after the contested 2020 US presidential election, and Donald Trump’s unfounded allegations that it was rigged. Nigel Farage and Reform UK make a big deal of it, and Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, has raised it again in the Commons this week, stating: “I have seen people carrying bag-loads of postal votes to a polling station on election day.” The relevant minister, Rushanara Ali, told him to tell the police.

Our failing water firms are a damning reflection of Broken Britain

The latest report from the Environment Agency on the state of Britain’s rivers is a veritable shower of euphemism and shame. “Serious pollution incidents”, the bland bureaucratic term preferred by the agency, are up by 60 per cent just in the last year.

We all know what that means: lumpy sewage in streams and on seashores that turns the stomach of anyone nearby, asphyxiates fish, and generally decimates the environment. “Wastewater” leaking out while being carried uphill is apparently a particular problem, one “impacting” swimmers.

Around 80 per cent of the most serious “incidents” were down to three companies – Thames Water (33 spillages), Southern Water (15) and Yorkshire Water (13).

There is no suggestion that the situation is likely to improve; indeed, all the talk is of Thames Water, the largest company of its kind in the country, collapsing under the weight of its own debt rather than its scandalous record on pollution.

It’s a damning reflection of “Broken Britain”. Why has a supposedly civilised G7 economy grown so easily accustomed to such an appalling state of affairs? It may be true that de-industrialisation has cleaned up some of the larger rivers and estuaries in recent decades, but the water companies, the regulators and successive governments can hardly take credit for that.

What they are responsible for is what is in their control – maintaining a sewage system that does what it is expected of it in the modern world. It is one of the most basic services – and yet in parts of the UK, it feels little more than a hopeless aspiration.

This river of excrement has been rolling for years, and, while the details can be complex, the principal streams of blame that feed into the scandal can be easily identified. Incomprehensibly weak regulation is the strongest of the currents, either because Ofwat was never given sufficient powers or a wide enough remit, or because it was incompetent, or all three.

There has never been a shortage of official bodies nominally overseeing matters – the Environment Agency and various iterations of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as well as local authorities – but always a huge deficit of effective democratic control.

There is, of course, a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this particular privatised industry: the provision of clean running water and efficient sewage disposal may not align with the commercial imperatives of the companies denationalised in 1989 in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland were spared the experiment). Profit and public service can co-exist and even flourish – but not always, and not everywhere.

Even if the industry had been regulated better, the privatised model combined with zero competition and regulated tariffs was poorly prepared for the task of investing the vast sums needed to renew the crumbling Victorian infrastructure, let alone build the reservoirs and pipework required to cater for a population that was to expand by some 12 million in the ensuing decades. Some public services ought not to be expected, let alone forced, to turn a profit.

But from early on, the major weakness in the regulatory regime was becoming apparent – that while the need to monitor charges and water quality was recognised, there was no oversight of the financial health of the companies.

Once the shares had been acquired from the small shareholders in the initial public offerings and placed in the hands of private equity firms, the companies were free to load themselves with as much debt as they fancied – which paid for bumper dividends for the new shareholders. It left a vital public service hopelessly over-mortgaged.

The chance was taken for some lucrative asset stripping, even certain reservoirs were sold off, and the companies were left so enfeebled that if Ofwat tried to fine them, they could plausibly claim that they would go bust. They contrived to make themselves too big to fail. Or so they hoped.

On Monday, the government will publish a review of the industry by Sir Jon Cunliffe, the head of the Independent Water Commission, and its own proposals will follow. As we reported on Friday, the government is expected to scrap Ofwat. It must use the power of parliament to chart a new course for the industry.

Despite the pollution crisis, the Treasury cannot afford immediately to renationalise the most distressed of the operators, Thames Water, because of its enormous debts – more than £16bn.

It seems inevitable that Thames will fall into the special procedure that will ensure continuing water and sewage services to 15 million customers in southern England and London while the government takes control.

This is a far cheaper remedy for the taxpayer, but it does still mean that the considerable cost of cleaning up the rivers, keeping the taps on and the loos flushing will, to some extent, fall to the taxpayers as well as the bill payers. Either that, or we just get used to having the dirtiest rivers and beaches in Europe.