Jennifer Holdich

On a stretch of the River Roding in Barking strewn with waste and detritus, a barrister named Paul Powlesland did something the British state has spent decades failing to do: he cleaned it and made it look like a river again. He now faces legal action. Yep. He and a group of volunteers hired a digger for £1,000 of their own money and hauled more than 200 bags of filth out of the water - packaging, broken appliances, used needles, even weapons. By any sane reckoning it was a small act of public good, civic spirit at its most potent and wholesome. For his trouble, he received a letter from the Environment Agency informing him that he is under investigation for working without a permit, an offence that carries up to two years in prison. The same Environment Agency that found the will to come after a volunteer for cleaning a river without the right paperwork has not, on that same river, prosecuted a single one of the illegal sewage spills that have fouled it for years. Not one. It's too fat, scrofulous, and indolent to fight the sort of people who'd do this. But it has energy to spare for the man with the digger and the bin bags because they expect he's likely to be a reasonable sort of Englishman who pays his taxes and honours procedure, however unreasonable it may be, when levied upon him. Protecting rivers? They have no interest in that. This is the thing about our institutions that the public grasps in its bones and the people who run them never will. Our institutions fail, and the manner of their failing is the worst part of it - the bloodless, box-ticking, permission-withholding callousness of bodies that have forgotten they exist to achieve anything at all. They should all be cleared out; every decision-making body in the building responsible for the dereliction of duty, and for daring to persecute a member of the public, must be hollowed out. The whole thing started from scratch. Better yet, I'll tell you what an outfit like Progress will do once it gains power; we'll put people like @paulpowlesland in charge of the very body now threatening to jail him. The institutions meant to look after this country - the Environment Agency and a dozen like it - are dying of exactly the defensive, do-nothing culture that sent that letter. They need to be run by people like him who actually give a toss. People with the brains to understand the problem and the plain human instinct to go and fix it themselves, while the rest stand on the bank writing their little sociopathic missives to the ones who already did. I don't know the first thing about Paul. I've never met him. I don't know what his political preferences are, the shape of his beliefs, what else we would agree or disagree on. None of that means a thing to me. He's a good man, and the right kind of man to make things work; and Progress is an attempt to make the country work, not a club made to serve a certain type or belief profile. A country is made to work by the people who, whatever their politics, cannot walk past a problem without trying to solve it. There are such people everywhere in Britain - on the rivers, in the schools, the wards, the workshops - and almost none of them are running anything, because the institutions have been built to keep that exact kind of person out. Drop the case against him. Then go further: find the hundred other Paul Powleslands the country is currently ignoring or threatening, and give them the keys. Put the responsibility and the authority, together, in their hands. Britain will be cleaned up - its rivers, and a great deal besides - in no time. It will be done by the people willing to get in the water, not by the ones writing letters about permits from the bank.