The Great Shellfish Apocalypse

In 2021, Stan Rennie had one of his best summers in five decades as a fisherman. “It was the first time we said we’d work to the winter if the weather permitted, ’cause we were enjoying it that much,” he recalls in All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea , a new documentary by Jeanie Finlay. Rennie has spent his life catching lobsters and crabs in the rich waters off Hartlepool in North East England. That summer he was netting 50-70 lobsters each day.

From his boat, named Sarah Lynn R after his wife, he can see the semi-detached seafront houses where much of his close and extended family lives. “The rest of the country might view it as a dump, but we love it,” he says. “You can’t beat home, can you?” Then, on 25 September, residents along 50 miles of that coastline found that their beaches had become a charnel house. Thousands of dead and dying shellfish, their bodies twitching and convulsing, were piled thick on the sand.

It was the first of several “die-offs” that left these seas barren and annihilated a centuries-old fishing industry. “Ecosystem wipeout,” Rennie calls it. To this day, despite two government inquiries, there is no official explanation for what caused this marine apocalypse. Finlay’s documentary, currently on release in selected cinemas, follows the region’s fishermen as they come to terms with their loss. This tragedy, it turns out, is about much more than crustaceans and lost livelihoods.

It is intertwined with themes which have haunted Britain for a decade: the legacy of deindustrialisation, the anger of the country’s left behind, and the false hopes offered by the political class. The North East has more neighbourhoods classed as highly deprived than any other region in England, with Hartlepool and Middlesbrough ranking among the three most deprived local authorities in the country. Hartlepool sits by the mouth of the River Tees, an area that was until the Eighties one of Britain’s industrial heartlands.

Teesside had a vast steelmaking industry, as well as power stations, chemical plants and shipbuilding facilities. Steel alone employed 40,000 workers. The rusted hulks of those factories loomed along the coastline where Rennie caught shellfish, painfully obvious symbols of a community in decline. Then, in 2021, the demolitions began. The Conservative government had earmarked the Tees estuary for a major redevelopment, to be overseen by the newly created Tees Valley Combined Authority and its Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen.

It was to be the country’s first “Freeport”, a launchpad for Brexit Britain that would attract global investors with preferential tax and customs arrangements. By 2023, the government had committed more than £250 million of public funds for the redevelopment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seeking to appeal to traditional Labour voters who had supported Brexit and then swung behind the Tories to deliver it. In the 2016 referendum, Leave won every borough in Teesside with at least 60% of the vote, and three years later, first-time Conservative voters (including Rennie, his wife and his daughter) had delivered Johnson half of the six Teesside seats.

More from this author The flight of the angry entrepreneurs By Wessie du Toit The plan was to clear Teesmouth, Europe’s largest brownfield site, to make way for the new development. The board responsible boasted that 10 years’ worth of clean-up work would take place in just two to three years. What the prospectus did not mention was that the old industries had for decades dumped their poisonous by-products into the landscape and the river itself.

This symbol of regional rebirth was being built on something akin to the edge of a volcano. Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of Finlay’s film. The first government inquiry into the crustacean die-off suggested that the culprit was an algal bloom, an explanation that the fishermen regarded as absurd. They had their own ideas about what caused the disaster. In the days preceding it, a dredging vessel clearing up after a landslip had removed 150,000 tonnes of sediment from the riverbed at Teesmouth, depositing it three miles out at sea.

The river estuary is regularly dredged — albeit not on this scale — and the ports authority maintains that the landslip was not caused by the demolitions then taking place. Nonetheless, the fishermen were convinced that dredged material had poisoned the waters, and raised funds to hire their own scientific researchers. According to these researchers, the evidence pointed towards pyridine, a chemical which had historically been used by industry at Teesside.

They claimed that crabs exposed to pyridine respond similarly to those observed on the beaches; that samples collected by the Environment Agency contained high levels of the substance; and that computer simulations showed a spillage from Teesmouth spreading down the coast much as the die-off had. To the fishermen who suddenly found themselves unable to support their families, and the locals whose dogs became sick after walking along the beaches, it appeared that the truth behind their ordeal was being suppressed.

Nothing could stand in the way of the totemic Teesside regeneration, a project that would, after all, involve a lot more dredging. Suspicions mounted throughout 2022 as a stench of malfeasance gathered around Houchen’s scheme. Reporting by Richard Brooks at Private Eye and local newspapers pointed to financial irregularities, misuse of public funds, and extraordinary benefits granted to a coterie of private developers around the mayor.

In time, these would become allegations of staggering duplicity and graft, leaving the development corporation heavily indebted. ‘Their beaches had become a charnel house.’ (All Rivers Spill Their Stories To The Sea/YouTube) The resentment towards a distant establishment which the Brexit project had harnessed so effectively was now turned against it. “Anywhere else in the country, the government would’ve thrown every resource at this,” Rennie says.

“Because we’re the North East, the back hole of the country, we’re just forgotten about.” The remarkable thing, though, is that while the fishermen’s sense of abandonment is understandable, they were not forgotten about at all. They became an emblem of the government’s betrayal of the people it claimed to represent, eagerly seized upon by critics of Johnson and Brexit. The populists had become the establishment, so their opponents could become populists in turn.

In June 2022, the Guardian ’s George Monbiot wrote that “with every passing week, it looks more like a cover-up”. He condemned the government inquiry for failing to publish its data and promoted the pyridine hypothesis. Channel 4 took the same course. That autumn, parliament’s environment select committee invited Rennie and the researchers working with the fishermen to make their case. The committee demanded a second, independent inquiry to address the conflicting accounts, but that too was called into question before it had even reported its findings.

Critics noted that it was appointed and overseen by government advisors, that some of its members were kept anonymous — to protect their independence — and that it refused to cooperate with the scientists behind the pyridine hypothesis. The experts assembled by that second government inquiry later complained that the idea that they — “politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies” — had “colluded on a fictitious report” was “preposterous” .

This narrative was, they suggested, being fed by “mistrust in government” and “inaccurate media coverage”. Unfortunately, their reasons for rejecting the pyridine hypothesis were never likely to cut through this atmosphere of suspicion, as they involved technical issues such as the validity of the samples and methods used for testing, and the chemical properties of the pyridine molecule itself. Likewise, though they dismissed the first inquiry’s theory about the algal bloom, their own preferred explanation — that a novel and unique pathogen had killed the crustaceans — did not satisfy anyone as it was entirely hypothetical.

There are still many question marks around the government’s response to the die-offs, and plenty of reason to think that, as Rennie puts it: “They don’t want to find the truth. They want to do the Freeport the cheapest option they can.” Despite the persistence of the shellfish deaths, the work at Teesmouth was not paused nor were proper samples taken of the riverbed. The government consistently hid behind a lack of evidence without making much effort to gather it.

After the second inquiry, Conservative environment minister Thérèse Coffey announced that no further investigation would take place concerning the pathogen mooted as the possible cause. She also insisted that government agencies had received no further reports of die-offs following the initial incident in 2021, which came as news to the Teesside locals who had been submitting such reports regularly. Nonetheless, the pyridine hypothesis is, in effect, a conspiracy theory.

Its popularity probably tells us less about the cause of the disaster than about the paranoia that has penetrated to the heart of British politics in the decade since the Brexit vote. This is the most revealing aspect of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea : try as you might to keep an open mind about the facts of the case, you cannot escape the conviction that these fishermen have been wronged, that they are victims of a system which cares nothing for them.

This impression stems from their brutal lack of political agency. Even as the machinery of democracy swings into action behind them, carrying them into parliament itself, their status seems to be little better than that of feudal subjects bringing a petition to their lord’s manor. They cannot navigate the state’s bureaucratic defences, pause the Teesmouth development, or prevent Houchen being re-elected. They are hostages to historical and ecological forces beyond their control, and ultimately become just another set of protestors waving their placards.

The image of paralysed crabs washing ashore symbolises the impotence of these communities, and their impotence, in turn, has become emblematic of a whole nation’s frustration that nothing, and least of all government, seems to work as it should. Hence the strange situation whereby these left-behind places have, on account of their powerlessness, become the most powerful source of moral legitimacy in British politics. Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Andy Burnham have all presented themselves as answers to the anger of Stan Rennie’s Britain — and their opponents have attacked them, above all, for betraying it.

“The image of paralysed crabs washing ashore symbolises the impotence of these communities” Teesside gives a sense of why the promises of politicians have so often turned to disappointment. Burnham’s big idea is to devolve power to local areas, but he is not the first to try this; the Tees Valley Combined Authority was created by the Tories in 2016. The allegations surrounding Houchen’s regime — prompting the government to announce a statutory investigation this month — suggest that far from bringing accountable authority closer to communities, devolution creates opportunities for charismatic local figures to indulge in cronyism far from the spotlight of the Westminster-centric media.

None are better placed to play on local grievances than local politicians who can blame their failures on others, as when Houchen claimed that opposition to dredging in the Tees came from “local activists and Labour politicians” attempting a “stitch-up”, because “they’d rather see the area fail than us succeed”. The crustacean die-offs also raise awkward questions for those who say that the key to British prosperity lies in less regulation and greater executive powers to force through developments opposed by pesky locals.

Teesmouth offers a glimpse of what a more Chinese approach to “delivering” actually looks like: even when there is an unexplained ecological catastrophe unfolding, developers will simply plough ahead and vilify critics as the enemies of progress. Much criticism of excessive regulation is justified, but we must acknowledge that Britain’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme fragility and depletion, not least thanks to the effects of historic pollution and mismanagement like that seen at Teesmouth.

Putting aside the pyridine hypothesis, the government inquiries into the disaster revealed that numerous toxic substances are entering the sea in alarming quantities. A