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Ah yes, the declaration of rights for rivers, an idea which came to my notice courtesy of the deputy leader of the Greens, Rachel Millward, who is one of those spearheading this campaign. And you wonder why people don’t always take progressive movements seriously. You take a perfectly good idea — protecting rivers — and find a way to make it risible.

The really impressive thing about this notion, which is simultaneously earnest and hilarious, is that a campaign to protect rivers from pollution, sewage dumping and so on, should be pretty popular without gimmickry. But the Greens can’t just be against river pollution; they have to transport us to Narnia. We have to believe in a world where rivers have a legal personality (I’m not making that up) and, presumably, can rely on the protection of the European Convention of River Rights (OK, that one I did make up).

Councils where the Greens are in power are pushing the idea. Lewes has accorded the River Ouse legal rights, though supporters admit these are aspirational rather than binding. The River Test in Hampshire has also been granted “personhood”. Of course, the rivers will still need an advocate when it comes to legal cases, you can’t have them dripping all over the High Court. A river which represents itself has a pool for a client.

Naturally, the rights of rivers are listed. They include the right to flow (terribly useful if you are a river); the right to perform essential functions within their ecosystems; the right to be free from pollution; the right to feed, and to be fed by, sustainable aquifers — and so on, to the right to a legal personality. It is not clear if this applies only to certified rivers or whether the Greens are discriminating against streams and brooks. Are creeks to be denied a legal personality?

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And why stop here? Are rivers to be denied their right to remain in the UK? Why should they be compelled to flow out of the country? What about their rights to a family life? What if they have tributaries that were born here? I could go on. Surely a river has the right to decide its gender? Why stop with water? Surely the trees should have rights too? They can’t forever rely on the Lorax to speak for them. And is grass forever to be trampled under foot?

Another party might simply say that humans should have the right to unpolluted rivers and that our children have the right not to have to swim in sewage. It might take up the perfectly reasonable idea of bolstering the environmental protection of rivers, perhaps through the appointment of a new clean rivers regulator or champion.

There are arguments about the limits to this. Some will use the green arguments as a reason to block new housing developments. The point, though, is that the public is definitely sympathetic to the broad idea of safeguarding rivers.

But frankly, such arguments are way too tailored to the self-interest of the race which constitutes 100 per cent of the electorate. We deplore such person-centric policymaking. So instead, the Greens depict a waterway as a sentient being, wrapping up a highly laudable end goal in the mother-earth kookiness that befits a party that thinks Edge of Darkness was a documentary.

The more generous among you may take exception to this mockery. Surely, you may argue, this is just those cuddly Greens highlighting an issue in an imaginative way. And it seems to be working, since I am talking about it. But this assumes that the publicity generated outweighs the scorn which accompanies it.

It all speaks to a cockeyed tendency to dress up arguments in a highfalutin moral philosophy, and the specious language of rights by a party that is actually far from cuddly and whose anti-growth economic outlook also makes it far from progressive. If you have a perfectly good argument, why complicate things in a way that makes your case look silly? A river does not need its own rights for polluting it to be a bad idea. What is the need for mystical personification? What next? Riva, our AI-generated river personality? She’s enlightened, vegan and tough on landlords too.

Still, I can see some uses. If rivers can have rights, so can voters. Not only should our rivers be unpolluted by sewage, our debate could be uncontaminated by twaddle.

If you have a burning dilemma you want answered, write to Robert at magazineletters@ft.com

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