Lake Windermere is England’s largest stretch of fresh water.

United Utilities, the water and sewage company for Cumbria, therefore consider it a suitable dump for their excess sewage. This and the other companies which took over the privatised sector in 1989, have since paid out £72 billion to (mainly foreign) shareholders, without amending the Victorian infrastructure they inherited, in order to separate sewage from rainwater.

Similarly, Scottish Water, although owned by the Scottish government tips raw sewage, on average, 14 times a day, into the Holy Loch and other Scottish lochs, rivers and coastal waters.

The directors of these companies ought to be stripped of all their ill-gotten assets and locked up.

The worst pollutant of the Holy Loch is the Trident submarine fleet, which ties up there, but the untreated sewage adds to the effluent from our most costly and most useless weapons system.

Is there nothing sacred in the eyes of our water magnates?  I dare say they even spit in church fonts and, under cover of darkness, piddle in the Trafalgar Square fountains.