‘The only thing necessary for litter to triumph is for the tidy to do nothing’

It was when Theodore Dalrymple was driving the 400 miles from London to Glasgow that the thought really struck him.

Over the previous few years he’d noticed how the odd cigarette butt near a bus stop had turned into a permanent pile and had watched fast-food wrappers become as much a part of Britain’s streets as red post boxes, but it wasn’t the kind of thing which kept him awake at night.

However, as he drove through England and across the Borders into Scotland he came to the conclusion that the entire country had been turned into one big rubbish dump. First to attract his attention were the endless plastic bags and sheets of polythene, which he describes as “flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags on a high Himalayan plain”, but it was the grass verges which really stopped him in his tracks.

“For mile after mile they were dappled with detritus: a few pages of newspapers, occasional hubcaps, but overwhelmingly the plastic packaging of refreshments bought by drivers and passengers along the way and thrown out of the window when finished with.

“It wasn’t just along the motorway. We took a detour to the Lake District and it was the same there, in fact it wasn’t until we reached the island of Mull that the littering ceased. I have driven long distances through France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium but I have seen nothing comparable there, Britain has become a vast litter bin.”

Back home, wherever Dalrymple went he became struck by just how much rubbish had accumulated in the country’s suburbs.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day and Britain wasn’t littered in an afternoon,” he says. “For several years every afternoon I walked the few hundred yards between the general hospital where I worked in the morning and the prison in which I worked in the afternoon. Prisons are seldom located in the most desirable part of town so it will come as no surprise that the streets through which I walked were poor.

“The litter changed day to day, but as the old was swept away by the council or blown away by the wind it was always replaced by new rubbish. I watched young people approach the bus stop snack in hand. They would pause near the bin, then take the wrapping from their snack and drop it on the ground.”

It’s the kind of scene witnessed by many, but for Dalrymple the sight was a vivid symbol of the breakdown of the traditional family unit. As he began to dig a little further, he discovered a survey which showed that 36 per cent of children had never eaten at a dining table with other members of their family. For many, he realised regular meal times had disappeared, replaced with food eaten on the move.

“In my medical work I made many home visits and often went to households which not only didn’t have a table, but had no evidence cooking had ever taken place. The nearest they came was reheating a prepared meal in a microwave.”

Tempting as it might be to blame the piles of fast food wrappers on some underclass, Dalrymple now believes we are all guilty of treating the environment as one big waste paper bin.

“While I was teaching a group of students, the subject of self-control came up and I mentioned that when I was young to eat on the street was still regarded as a somewhat degraded thing to do,” he says. “The students laughed at what they saw as quaint, outmoded and ridiculous gentility. They could see no reason whatever for a such a strange taboo.

“When I walked in an area of the city inhabited largely by students I had to wade through the rubbish on the pavement, all of it wrappings of fast food. I am sure most British students would express a tender concern for the environment, but the mess directly around them, particularly the one they had helped themselves to create, seems to raise no concern. Some of it is down to sheer laziness. I recently saw a British businessman, well-dressed and prosperous, throw a small piece of litter into a bin at Lyon airport while waiting for his flight. The litter hit the rim and fell to the ground. He looked at it, thought about picking it up and even made a slight wave as if he were about to do so. But decided against and walked on.”

On his travels, one of the few litter-free oases he found was Eastbourne seafront and the reason he believes is that the area is largely populated by the elderly who still regard dropping litter as a cardinal sin.

“I am not just someone lamenting the passage of time,” he says. “I’ve scanned old photographs of ordinary street scenes in Britain for litter, but rarely see any at all. There is an argument that says in those days people were too poor to throw anything away, even a scrap of paper and of course plastic and polystyrene weren’t even invented then, but it’s a spurious one.

“People have always had enough to make a mess and they don’t make a mess in proportion to their income or standard of living, The fact is that in other countries where the same commercial forces have led to the same or similar ways of packaging food, the level of littering is incomparably lower.

“Unfortunately Britons now drop litter as unconsciously as snails leave a trail of slime.”

Dalrymple believes that part of the problem lies with technology which has made us increasingly disconnected with the real world.

“Students walk through littered streets without noticing it not only because they are accustomed to it, but because they are cocooned in a little world of their own. From a very early age, they are more familiar with the television screen than the outside world. And those that do notice it expect other people to clear it up.”

As well as bemoaning the state of Britain, Dalrymple also has some solutions, starting with the enforcement of fines.

“Notices threatening litterers with severe penalties are often accompanied by litter strewn around as if in sacrificial offering,” he says. “No one expects the threat to be carried out and while the law is not all powerful, if enforced it can and does change habits.”

He cites the example of Singapore which cleaned up its act through fines and he also goes a few steps further calling for the reintroduction of weekly rubbish collections and a few measures he knows would be unpopular.

“I propose a tax on chewing gum to be used solely for clearing the streets of this unsightly nuisance and if that doesn’t work outright prohibition,” he says. “The fact is that the only thing that is necessary for litter to triumph is for the tidy to do nothing.”

And for Dalrymple at least, that is not an option.

Litter – How Other People’s Rubbish Shapes Our Lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, £9.99, is available to order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop on 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk

Mounting toll of litter louts

According to a study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, litter in the UK has soared 500 per cent since the 1960s.

In the same research, more than a third of those questioned said littering was sometimes or always acceptable.

A report published by Keep Britain Tidy earlier this year showed cigarette litter is now at is highest since annual surveys began in 2002.

Clearing up rubbish costs the country £858m a year.

Alongside fines, campaign groups are now calling for the introduction of incentive schemes, citing a project in New York which offered a small deposit back on drink cans and bottles which saw roadside litter across the state reduce by 70 per cent.