The Great British Poo Cruise

<p>Danny Dyer, Britain's sewage scandal, polluted rivers, failing water companies and an enormous floating turd. Yes, really. The actor has taken to the River Thames with a giant inflatable poo, demanding an end to sewage pollution and calling for Britain's water industry to be returned to public ownership. It's a serious environmental campaign, apparently. Although it's difficult to maintain an entirely straight face when your principal political argument is floating past Parliament looking like something produced by a constipated elephant.</p><p>But is Danny Dyer genuinely fighting for cleaner rivers, or is this another celebrity publicity stunt? And, more importantly, does it matter?</p><p>In this episode of <strong>Mark and Pete</strong>, we plunge into Britain's sewage crisis. Not literally, obviously. We're not completely mad.</p><p>And the figures are staggering. England recorded <strong>450,398 sewage spills in 2024</strong>, falling to 291,492 in 2025. That's an improvement, certainly, although unusually dry weather helped. Meanwhile, water bills are rising, ageing infrastructure needs billions in investment, and ordinary customers are left wondering why they're paying increasingly enormous sums for a service that sometimes appears to involve pumping the contents of their toilets into the nearest river.</p><p>Lovely.</p><p>Danny Dyer's Thames protest attracted considerable attention, with a petition signed by hundreds of thousands demanding water industry nationalisation. And fair play to him, perhaps. He has a platform and he's using it. But there's something faintly ridiculous about modern celebrity campaigning. Everything must be a spectacle. A stunt. Something enormous and inflatable. Preferably photographed from seventeen different angles and distributed across social media before anybody has examined what the proposed solution might actually cost.</p><p>Mind you, perhaps that's unfair. Perhaps a giant poo is precisely the level of political sophistication required nowadays.</p><p>We also investigate the history of <strong>water privatisation in Britain</strong>, the profits and debts of water companies, sewage dumping, environmental regulation, Thames Water's financial troubles and the argument for public ownership. Would nationalisation genuinely improve Britain's waterways? Or would we simply replace private-sector incompetence with government incompetence, which at least has the reassuring familiarity of being paid for twice?</p><p>And wh