I joined a historic protest against sewage pollution and marched alongside thousands demanding an end to polluting for profit.
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00:00Hi I'm Isabella Bonham, a reporter for National World and I'm in central London
00:05today where a protest is taking place against sewage pollution. Hundreds of
00:09people are here taken to the streets with banners, placards, basically calling on
00:14the government to stop the pollution in Britain's waterways. There's the likes of
00:19Chris Beckham here, other famous faces, a lot of activists and a lot of noise.
00:30My name is Chris Beckham and I'm a broadcast and environmental campaigner and I've come along to the march for clean water because that's what I want, I want clean water. I want clean water because everything I love lives in, near it, always dependent upon it, that's life for instance. So I grew up in a world where I could paddle in streams that were crystal clear, full of sticklebacks and trout, covered in damselflies and kingfishers and it's gone. And I feel abused and ripped off by those greedy water companies that have stolen all that water from us.
01:00We've got money, not invested in the infrastructure, but that's all bad news, the good news is we know how to fix it. We just need those people to do it and we've come to politely remind them that they have a duty to do so. So what we're going to ask them to do is scrap the regulator because of what have been useless, to get the polluters to pay and start investing seriously in the agencies that need to monitor and restore our waterways. And today we're wearing blue, if we don't get our demands heard, next time we'll come back in and we'll be wearing brown and you know what that means.
01:30We are here to hold the government to account and if they do not listen to us and they do not reassure us that they are actually taking the right solutions with the right people, we'll be back with even more people.
01:45Everything got privatised and instead of actually putting money into infrastructure and putting money into sorting out the sewage system, they just took money out of the company, they put loads of debt on the company and now what they want to do is put our bills up. So they say they're going to improve things but it needs to be quicker, it needs to be faster and they actually need to run the proper service.
02:09They need to give us clean water to drink and they need to be treating our sewage and it seems since privatisation in the last 20-30 years all they've been doing is making money for themselves and that's just not right, it's not right for wildlife, it's not right for the people who live and work near the river.
02:39We're shooting our water! What do we want? Clean water! When do we want it? Now! What do we want?