In a development that has left environmental health officers reaching for their gas masks and their copies of the Geneva Convention, a Nigerian man has been banged up in a British prison for the heinous crime of storing human waste. Yes, you read that correctly. While the nation's sewage systems crumble and water companies pump enough raw effluent into our rivers to fill the Serengeti, one man is doing porridge for having a poorly managed compost heap. The sheer, glorious absurdity of it all makes me want to down a bottle of Gordon's and set fire to my recycling bin.
Let us set the scene, dear reader. The accused, a gentleman of Nigerian extraction, was allegedly stockpiling faecal matter at his residence in a manner that would make a sewage treatment plant blush. The neighbours complained about the pong. The council waded in with rubber gloves and a warrant. And before you could say 'biological hazard', our protagonist was in handcuffs, heading for a cell where he could contemplate the error of his ways while sharing a communal toilet with a dozen other inmates. The irony is so thick you could spread it on a crumpet.
Now, I am not for one moment condoning the unsanitary storage of human detritus. But let us cast our minds to the bigger picture. This is a country where Thames Water spills enough raw sewage into the Thames each year to fill the Royal Albert Hall several times over. A country where water companies routinely dump untreated waste into our seas, forcing swimmers to paddle in a veritable broth of E. coli and used condoms. And yet, the full might of the British legal system is brought to bear on one man, a migrant, for doing essentially the same thing but on a smaller scale and without the shareholder dividends.
It is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the 1971 Immigration Act. The establishment needs a scapegoat, a symbol of foreign filth to distract from its own systemic decay. Never mind that the water companies are laughing all the way to the bank while our rivers run brown. Never mind that the government refuses to properly fund environmental health services. No, we must make an example of this poor fellow, because nothing says 'we take hygiene seriously' like locking up a black man for smelling a bit ripe.
I spoke to an 'expert' from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sanitation, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being flushed out of his job. 'It's a disgrace,' he said, his voice quivering with a mixture of rage and suppressed laughter. 'This man is being punished for a crime that is, in essence, the same as what the water companies do every day. But he doesn't have a PR department. He doesn't have a chief executive on a million-pound bonus. He's just a bloke with some bins and a dodgy sense of what constitutes acceptable waste management.' Quite.
The implications of this case are staggering. If the government can imprison a man for storing human waste on his private property, what next? Will they start arresting seagulls for shitting on statues? Will they lock up the royal corgis for defecating on palace lawns? I suspect not, because those are British things. British waste is somehow more palatable, more refined. It is the waste of a nation that believes its shit does not stink.
In the end, this story is not about one man's unfortunate choice of storage method. It is about a country that has lost its way, a country that prefers to point fingers at the vulnerable rather than clean up its own mess. It is a story of double standards, of hypocrisy, of a legal system that will happily throw away the key for a minor environmental infraction while letting the real polluters off with a slap on the wrist and a tax break.
But do not despair, gentle reader. For in this tale of woe, there is a glimmer of hope. A petition is already circulating to have the man released and given a job as a sewage consultant. The water companies are said to be interested. After all, he has experience. And in the topsy-turvy world of British environmental policy, that might just make him the most qualified man in the country.
