Feargal Sharkey: The fight for clean water is uniting the country
Water industry chiefs wouldn’t last two minutes in the music business, the singer turned campaigner tells Robert Crampton
This was the year the water industry, agriculture, the regulators and the government promised to clean up their act. Clean rivers would be prioritised over profit.
This most precious resource would no longer be delivered at the expense of environmental degradation. Swimmers, paddlers, sailors and anglers would once again be able to enjoy the nation’s waterways free from unspeakable lurking pollutants, both invisible and all too obvious.
The most high-profile campaigner against river pollution has long been Feargal Sharkey, the singer turned environmental lobbyist. Have the authorities, I asked him this week, started to make good on their pledges? Or are England’s rivers as filthy as ever?
“To quote Johnny Rotten,” he says before he’s even got his coat off, having just bounced through the door of a north London pub where we met on Thursday night, “‘ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’”
The question is rhetorical. “My God, have we been cheated! Absolutely shafted. Seventy two billion paid in dividends! Sixty billion of debt! Nearly three million hours pumping out raw sewage in 2021! Three billion litres lost in leaks every day! Just 14 per cent of our rivers with “good” ecological status and every single one polluted to some extent. Studies say that will soon be down to 6 per cent without massive intervention.”
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Sharkey tells interviewers he retired as a singer because he didn’t want to be an old rock star with “a receding hairline and a ponytail”. So he became, instead, a music industry executive, a lobbyist, a respected committee man and, latterly, a solo, wildly successful voice against river pollution, his Twitter account a clearing house for articles exposing the scandalous state of England’s water industry.
As Sharkey draws breath, I decide his joke about the getting into activism to avoid the fate of the fading star does not provide the full explanation of his apparent transformation. For one thing, at 65, he still has a magnificent head of hair, the fringe he sported on Top of the Pops back in the late Seventies still long and thick enough for him to have to continually flick it out of his eyes in a trademark gesture.
For another, two hours in his company is more than enough time (five minutes does the trick) to realise that this is man whose quick, clever mind, articulacy and command of detail were never going to be satisfied with a late middle-age spent recycling the hits of his youth.
For anyone under the impression he is a dilettante pop star turned eager yet amateurish campaigner, you could not be more wrong: Feargal Sharkey is one of the most intellectually impressive people I’ve interviewed in 30-plus years. This is a seriously bright man. He’s also entertaining, confident, with an unsparing line in invective.
“The people I meet in the water industry wouldn’t make it to lunchtime on Tuesday in the music business,” he says. “They’d be gone. Nobody would tolerate their level of incompetence.”
He feels the same way about the supposed regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, and the elected ministers who sit above them.
“They’re mediocre, and that’s being polite. They cannot fend off one bloke in north London with nothing more than a f***ing mobile phone and a social media account. What does that say about their leadership qualities? They’re not up to it! After 13 years and countless reshuffles, we’re now not scraping the barrel, we’re drilling into the concrete the f***ing barrel is sitting on.”
The other factor behind Sharkey’s transition into such a compelling campaigner is that it’s not really a transition: he’s been doing it all his life. The second-youngest of seven, he was raised in Derry’s Bogside in a highly political household. His dad, Jim, was a radical but non-sectarian trade unionist and Labour Party stalwart; his mum, Sibeal, a classic indomitable Irish matriarch.
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By the age of ten, in the late Sixties, young Feargal was already a veteran of the city’s civil rights marches with their demands to end institutionalised discrimination against Catholics in the province. In many ways, it was the interlude as a professional musician that was the aberration.
All that he’s done since calling time on performing in the Nineties — chairing government commissions, regulating commercial radio, effectively acting as the leading spokesman for Britain’s music industry for many years, now eviscerating the UK’s woeful water companies on a daily basis — is a return to the advocacy and activism with which he grew up.
He could have been a barrister, a politician, a mandarin. Exciting and melodic as the Undertones once were, I would trade that to have had Sharkey’s clarity and competence at the heart of UK governance these past four decades instead.
Never mind, he’s getting close to the centre of power now. A member of the Labour Party himself, Sharkey’s influence will be felt very clearly at Defra as and when his party forms a government. Will Labour come down in favour of renationalisation, I ask? His response is instructive. “There’s no decision. Is renationalisation the answer? I don’t know. Is the industry and its regulators in need of massive reform? Yes. After that we can get into a discussion of what [ownership] might look like. Right now I’m cautious. I wouldn’t take anything off the table.”
I say fair enough; perhaps renationalising an industry with £60 billion of debt is not ideal. “Listen,” he urges, leaning across the table and tapping my arm for emphasis: “I can think of lots of ways to nationalise them without it costing a penny. The new chairman of Thames Water told a parliamentary committee today that nationalisation would cost the taxpayer a pretty penny. That is a misleading and untrue statement.”
The trouble is (I’m paraphrasing, but not much) Sharkey and many other experts, not to mention consumers, think that after almost 34 years of mismanagement, assuming public ownership — in the manner of Northern Rock, or RBS — is too good for the water industry. “If you nationalise, even for nothing, you’ve let companies off the hook. Does the public want that? I recently spoke at a Financial Times event. The first questioner — a woman, well-spoken, turned out she was a KC — said: ‘Feargal: I need these people to feel pain’.”
“Why should the taxpayer,” he goes on, “be on the hook for fixing their sorry mess, which we’ve already paid for? The power is there to enforce the law! Always has been, section 19 of the 1991 Water Act: Ofwat can issue an enforcement order [over sewage releases] and if they don’t comply, it can fine them 10 per cent of their annual turnover.” The power is there, never been used!”
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It is much the same story with agriculture, an even bigger river polluter, as a report from the centre-right think tank Onward showed when released on Saturday. “The ‘Farming Rules for Water’ are there, since 2003,” cries Sharkey. “They’re not enforced!” Environment Agency inspections of farms have been slashed, court cases barely pursued, dozens of videos circulate online of farmers spraying excess slurry over hedges into fields, soon to be washed into the nearest water course. Even so, “I’ve massive sympathy for farmers,” says Sharkey. “But some of our agriculture is unsustainable.”
If Sharkey sounds angry and animated, he is not alone. I’ve rarely known an issue as likely to enrage people — right across the political spectrum — as England’s polluted waterways. “The last time I got stopped in the street this much I had a number one record,” he confirms. I mention that I recently interviewed the Tory MP Danny Kruger, tribune of the rural, communitarian (some would say feudalistic) right, and he was every bit as livid as the most left-wing deep-green eco warrior about our rivers.
“I know Danny,” says Sharkey. “And I know where he’s coming from. And I know his mum [Prue Leith].” This illustrates Sharkey is no shouty Just Stop Oil-style radical. He’s an insider, well-connected in Whitehall and Westminster, willing and able to do the hard yards in the corridors and committee rooms of power. “Some call it selling out, I call it buying in.”
The received wisdom about Sharkey’s environmentalism is it originated in his lifelong love of fly-fishing. While the passion for angling is accurate, I suspect this is a man who, having spent many years championing live music and ensuring the legal framework existed for it to flourish, would have found another cause to fight soon enough even if he’d never picked up a fishing rod. Yet while the “genial Irish fella who just wants to cast for trout without wading through crap” narrative greatly underestimates Sharkey’s subtlety and sophistication, the raw outrage he feels owes a lot to the sheer pleasure of his chosen leisure pursuit.
“This week, the Atlantic salmon in the UK was added to the red list of endangered species. A species, been here since the last Ice Age, on the brink of extinction. What did Defra say? Nothing.” Sharkey has just stepped down after five years as chairman of the venerable Amwell Magna Fishery on the River Lea in Hertfordshire. But he’s still up there in his waders, every Sunday morning for a couple of hours at a minimum. “In 40 minutes from my home I can be standing in chalk stream to cast a dry fly at a wild brown trout born and bred in the biggest tributary of the River Thames. Pure tranquillity, as Izaak Walton said in The Compleat Angler, which was the predecessor of Gone Fishing now that I think about it, 400-odd years ago. I’ve got this lunatic mind going 50,000mph with 79 things going on. I can push all that noise to the back.” Does he catch much? “Most of the time. I’m quite good! But I’ve been doing it since I was ten.”
He brings a similar 55 years of experience to bear on excoriating the greed, lack of accountability, incompetence and absence of leadership which has resulted in England’s rivers swimming in shit. “I’ve always deployed the same strategy. Let’s have a grown up, pragmatic sit-down discussion. Here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s what I need you to do. If we’re clever everyone walks out with a big smile. All I want is a grown up, pragmatic response back. But if you don’t want to take that route, I know 1,000 other ways for you to end up where I want you to be.” I don’t doubt it.
Curriculum vitae
Born August 13, 1958, Derry, Northern Ireland
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Career As a teenager, started playing music with friends who would become the punk group The Undertones. Became their lead singer and in 1978, they were signed and released their hit debut single, Teenage Kicks. Became a solo singer in 1983. His song A Good Heart reached No 1 in 1985. In the Nineties, worked for Polydor Records and the Radio Authority, later became the head of UK Music. Appointed OBE for services to music in 2019. Now a campaigner and lobbyist for cleaner rivers and streams. Supported The Times Clean It Up campaign this year.
Family Lives in north London with his wife.
Quick fire
I’m a Celebrity or Strictly Come Dancing: “Neither! Strictly, under duress!”
Fish and chips or pan-fried turbot: “Fish and chips every time”.
Derry Girls or Normal People: “Derry Girls is brilliant, sublime comedy.”
The Nile or The Seine: “I’ve never been to the Nile but the Seine is disgusting.”
Spotify or SoundCloud: “At least Spotify pay the artist, miserable amount as it is.”
Guinness or G&T: “Vodka and Coke for me please.”
Uber or Lime: “Uber. I live at the top of a hill.”
Deadliest Catch or River Monsters: “River Monsters.”
