Since the long summer nights, lorries have been secretly dumping a 490ft long and 20ft high fissure of filth made of domestic waste, shredded plastics, polystyrene and paperwork from schools and councils in south-east England, in a field between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington. And since November 2000, a 5 foot 8½ inch Nigel Farage, made of beer, fags, Breaking Point posters and alleged teenaged racism, has appeared on Question Time 38 times. Both pose a toxic threat to their immediate environment, their polluting presences products of naked cynicism and the lack of due diligence. And now the waters are rising and it’s too late to deal with either effectively.
In the Kidlington field, private contractors have clearly passed their rubbish disposal duties onto some Sopranos-style waste management company and now its actions are contaminating the Cherwell itself. The Cherwell is a tributary of the Thames, our national mythic waterway, which first rises inauspiciously in a layby on the A436 at Seven Springs, some 40 miles west, between a bacon butty vending van and a fluttering flag of Saint George. And somewhere nearby, on a lingering last scrap of common land, a beanfield malingerer from the 80s Peace Convoy resolutely hawks carved wooden hares and kestrels to motorists from the back of a bastardised Bedford van. This is my England! But what’s that foul smell? Oh. Sweet Thames flow softly.
The Kidlington filth mound also speaks of our own hypocrisy. Because the size of the Oxfordshire shitpile is insignificant compared to the 10 million tonnes of toss we export annually, much of it left untreated in open-cast dumps in the developing world, picked over by scavenging children in search of anything remotely valuable. I saw a photo of a sachet of the very food I feed my cats here in Hackney fly-tipped from a major Malaysian plastic waste processing plant into a field in Selangor. Isn’t the modern world wonderful. Distance has disappeared. We are truly a global society.
The stretch of our shit that’s visible in Kidlington merely shows in one little corner of Oxfordshire what we are doing to the planet. Maybe a sea turtle in west Africa has choked on a Kinder eggshell you threw away in West Lothian. Maybe a plastic straw once used by the gak Pogle Michael Gove has made its way into the hands of a trash-mound-trawling infant in Indonesia. Maybe an elderly man in Malaysia has joyfully snatched up a plastic 1990s McDonald’s Happy Meal model of Matthew Broderick as Inspector Gadget and considered his day’s work well and truly done. Traces of our stupid civilisation stain the planet like vomit up the Downing Street wall of a Boris Johnson-era lockdown party.
A huge pile of illegally dumped waste in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. Photo: Carl Court/Getty
Question Time’s Fiona Bruce is a woman leaning out of an 18th-century window with a chamber pot of human excrement in her hand and shouting ‘Gardeloo’ at pedestrians beneath
At an estimated £25m, the cost of removing the Kidlington mess mound is more than the local council’s entire annual budget, but hopefully it can be done before the Cherwell goes the way of plastic-pelleted Camber Sands, all our notable Brown Flag beaches, and the shellfish cemetery of the north-eastern English coast. Hundreds of tonnes of rubbish are on their way into the river. And in a not unrelated issue, what is the clean-up cost of the Nigel Farage pollution we have left unchecked, and can that particular torn net of toxic nurdles ever now be resealed?
The problem is, just as the Environment Agency allowed the Oxfordshire field to fill with filth, so compliant sensation-seeking media has normalised the filth of Farage for years. In his relentless and unquestioning LBC platforming of Farage, Nick Ferrari is like an unmarked lorry backing up to a river and emptying out the contents of an entire Glastonbury Festival’s worth of portable toilets; and Question Time’s Fiona Bruce, in her less than forensic accommodations of the Reform leader, is a woman leaning out of an 18th-century top-floor window with a chamber pot of human excrement in her hand and shouting “Gardeloo” at pedestrians beneath about to be showered with Faragey faeces, most of whom have got so used to it they now look forward to another dousing and actually appear to enjoy the experience. Ordinary people think it’s nice just to be noticed. The other party leaders don’t even deign to shower the electorate with shit.
The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, is asked, repeatedly, by other politicians and the press to apologise for his role in an experiment to hypnotically enhance the size of women’s breasts while working as a Harley Street hypnotherapist 12 years ago – a process which would surely find favour with some sections of the electorate, such as connoisseurs of the outsider cinema of Russ Meyer, Baron Toby “Padma Lakshmi’s Massive Boobs” Young of Acton, and my late father.
Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has declared Putin, whose spy subs now nibble at our undersea communication networks and whose cyber-bots tick away destabilising our democracy, the world leader he most admires; and he declines to comment on credible suggestions that he sang songs about gassing Jews to Jewish pupils at his school as a teenager. The compliant press seems unlikely to pursue the issue. In the grand scheme of things we should be less worried about hypnotically enhanced breasts than we are about the appeasement of Putin and the whitewashing of fascism. It’s a question of priorities. We can worry about the hypnotically enhanced breasts later, when people on estates full of threatening flags don’t live in fear of what they clearly signify.
Meanwhile, the rubbish rots. In PMQs on Wednesday, Keir Starmer’s cautiously worded reply to Ed Davey’s question about the Kidlington crap suggested every effort would be made to identify the industrial-scale fly-tippers and make them pay for the cleanup. Starmer seemed careful, however, not to suggest that funds would be freed up to move the mess now. But there’s no time to lose. Look at the way that Farage, left to fester, has polluted the entire body politic. Maybe someday a real rain will come and wash him away. For now, Keir Starmer just stands there, a hosepipe in his hand, unwilling or unable to turn on the tap.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November