Merde! France is wondering what on earth Britain has done to the water

French media has published pictures of warnings to British holidaymakers not to swim off parts of the English and Welsh coast for fear of being infected by faecal matter

Just because no English minister or tabloid editor speaks French, it should not be assumed that the same is true on the other side of the Channel.

In the space of just weeks, Britain has become the butt of every joke in France about the dirty old man of Europe, where stinking rubbish in the summer heat piles up on the streets of Edinburgh at what is still Europe’s biggest summer festival of art, music, theatre and culture.

The endless Brexit queues for holidaymakers at Calais and Dover are looked on with pity, as are the regular reports on French television and radio about Britain gripped by endless strikes in “l’été de mécontentement” – as the French call our “summer of discontent”, in homage to the 1970s when Britain was seen as the sick man of Europe.

In France, correspondents of British newspapers – including The Daily Telegraph – star in French TV discussions about why nothing is working chez les rosbifs. They are allowed (in stark contrast to the BBC) to mention Brexit as a contributory factor to the galloping inflation, food price hikes and melting purchasing power of those on modest income.

The French have been gripped by the drama of the decapitation of Boris Johnson as prime minister. His famous appeal to President Macron – “donnez-nous un break!” in some tiddler row over fishing is still remembered – and no one in France can work out why Brexit means young British artists cannot perform in the innumerable summer festivals in France, or why Johnson has imposed such a hard Brexit that the British hope of buying a second home at a low price in remote corners of France has now been denied to les Anglais.

But there is one thing the French won’t accept – and that is dirty Brits poisoning their food. The fish markets of France’s Atlantic coast are one of the glories of global eating; a magical delight of firm fresh mackerel, sea bass, lobsters, crabs, halibut, mussels, sea trout, mussels, sardines and oysters pulled fresh from the sea every morning before dawn and presented in big covered markets on marble slabs – with fishmongers, often women, expertly filleting the fish or shucking oysters to be eaten within hours.

From Boulogne to Biarritz, every half-sized city and town on France’s coastline has a lustrous, luscious fish market that we long ago lost in Britain in favour of fish fingers and sad little fillets sealed under plastic in Sainsbury’s.

Now, thanks to reading British newspapers, the French have discovered that our privatised water companies are dumping our s*** into the sea. Leaving Europe has meant that genetically modified beef and lamb can now be produced, thus killing the UK’s meat, especially lamb exports to the continent.

It also means that the UK does not have to follow the much tougher EU regulations on what can be dumped into the sea. Tory MPs voted in the Commons to relax the restriction of dumping sewage into the rivers to flow into the sea or directly into the sea itself from coastal cities and towns.

In recent days, French TV has been full of reports about storms and high waves lashing the Atlantic coast between La Rochelle and Bordeaux. There are big notices up warning people not to swim as rip tides can sweep the unwary simmer out to be drowned.

The French media has also published pictures of warnings to British holidaymakers not to swim off parts of the English and Welsh coast for fear of being infected by faecal matter (”merde”, to you and me) that our super profiteering water companies dump in the seas shared with France.

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Now, French MEPs from Normandy and other coastal areas are asking the French government to take action under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreementby asking the European Commission and European Court of Justice to try and get the British government to stop their water companies destroying the fish and shellfish on which so many French coastal communities depend.

There are international – as well as European – conventions that are meant to protect the quality of water in the seas in which both humans and fish swim.

Doubtless, the manic Francophobes and Macron-haters in the Tory Party and the Brexit press will denounce any suggestion that Britain might order water companies not to poison French fish or let their filth arrive on French shores.

Economically, Brexit is making Britain the sick man of Europe. Thanks to Boris Johnson, we now have the reputation of the dirty old man of Europe – his final gift to the British people before he falls into the dustbin of history.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former minister of Europe