Engaging in serious litter picking in my locality was when I started to become seriously aware that Britain had become a decadent and degenerate society. One is brought face to face with selfishness and insouciance. The lack of good parenting (no one who has a sense of stigma about dropping litter engendered into them in childhood will do this) is also obvious. I have thought very hard about the problem of this low-level antisocial behaviour and am pained by the degradation of the country I grew up in. I have tried hard to understand where it has come from. Litter is a symptom of a deeper malaise. I watched a TV program on the subject years ago in which a middle aged woman, frustrated by the despoiling of her town, was approaching people who dropped things in the street. One young man who had just tossed a cigarette end took exception to her asking him to pick it up and put it in a litter bin. “I’ll do what the fuck I want” he sneered at her. And that phrase summed up the problem we have: people have lost that sense of responsibility to others and their community; they have taken it upon themselves to behave as if no one else exists.
What is the solution? I do not believe that society can fix itself. Organisations, companies and countries which are bumping along the bottom can reform but it takes someone with exceptional leadership skills to make this happen. Do we have anyone like that?
Re: Britain has the worst litter problem in the developed world’
I hear your Britain and I'll raise you Baltimore. I would clean up in front of my house one day and the next day, like the stone of Sisyphus, trash would abound again. And we had regular incidents of dumping on vacant lots, or behind them. A trash heap left on the street behind me grew so vile, rat-ridden and fetid (apparently it included dead animals) that an auto shop on the street finally tricked a city councilman to come down and videoed him getting a good whiff of it, followed by a chewing out for the sanitation department's dereliction.
This piece brought to mind my own memory of reading a well-known book in the Arab world, “The Arabs Through Japanese Eyes”, authored by a Japanese orientalist. In it, the author appears almost obsessed with a particular question: why were the streets of many Arab cities—especially in the republics—so often marked by visible neglect, litter, and disrepair?
His bewilderment stemmed from an apparent contradiction. As an orientalist, he was well aware that both personal and public hygiene occupy an important place in Islam. Yet, he could not reconcile this with the stark contrast he observed between the meticulous cleanliness of the private homes of his Arab friends, and the deteriorating conditions of the cities in which they dwelled. This tension led him to put forward several possible explanations, among them the following:
He argued that the erosion of public hygiene reflected a deeper, collective sentiment among large segments of the population: a sense of alienation from the direction and governance of their own states. In such a context, civic responsibility weakens. Why bother to take care of streets and public squares when one’s voice carries little weight, elections are rigged, and the individual is reduced to a little cog within a corrupt, decaying, and indifferent state apparatus?
I remember visiting Beirut last September, and it was a cultural shock -in terms of public hygiene-.
Yes, Dubai and other Gulf cities are so different. More should be done to increase green spaces in the cities, but yes, they appear so spotless compared to other places in the region!
"Monarchs have from time-to-time berated city authorities for the state of their streets, one of the first known being Edward III’s instructions to the City of London after the Black Death complaining about the filth. "
This being the Middle Ages it brings to mind a certain dialogue,
The unsparing Google Street View documents the UK's decline in tidiness, as I'm sure we all know. Sad but instructive. My Dad appears in Google Street View, incidentally, trying to clean up the out of control clutter on his property, which was so bad it could also be detected from space with satellite view. The internet never forgets, never forgives.
If it is any comfort, I lived in NYC in the early 1970's. When looking out the window of a taxi that was taking me to Laguardia, there was so much litter on the ground that you could not see the ground. Litterly. That has since improved.
I was only in the UK once on a business trip in the late 1990s (Bristol area) and was appalled by the amount of trash in the public spaces. My local colleague attributed this to the absence of litter receptacles caused by the IRA’s bombing campaign.
However, when I stooped to pick up a discarded candy wrapper, I was sharply reprimanded with, “We don’t do that here.”
Even today, in 2026, the litter receptacles in British rail stations are a ring of metal and a clear plastic bag . . . the IRA stopped being a hazard in 1999 . . . ugliness and insouciance!
I didn’t think the late 1990s were that bad for litter. More importantly, where were you going to put said ‘candy’ wrapper, when there were no ‘litter receptacles’? 🤔
In my pocket, of course. I often do this with small bits of ‘clean’ trash, until I can find a bin or go home.
If the 1990s weren’t that bad, I truly wouldn’t want to see the area today! I found it sad that people took so little pride in their city/country. I was taught that the state of one’s surroundings was a direct reflection of character and values (and messy desk, messy mind). England is beautiful (mostly), why trash it up?
Well done you! I sometimes pick stuff up if there is a bin nearby, but that’s as far as I go. With litter generally, you should have seen London in the 1970s! And the buildings were all covered in soot…
I’ve been pondering your original comment today and have come to see that you are right. Outside big cities and their slums, Americans do have more civic pride than us Brits - and the US has more laws covering anti-social acts, as well as having more people empowered to and willing to enforce those laws. Here in Britain, we currently have major problems with cycling on the pavement/sidewalk, riding motorised scooters on the pavement, and allowing dogs to be dangerously out of control - people are being killed. They are all criminal offences, but the police almost never take action before a serious incident and many citizens actually approve of these anti-social acts, to the extent that they get angry when anyone tells them not to break the law!
I live near Boise, Idaho. The two groups who annoy me the most are the irresponsible dog owners (this town is totally dog-besotted) and mountain bikers, who expect hikers to jump aside when they barrel down trails in the foothills. OTOH, I am a birder, and almost everyone in my weekly birding group picks up trash in the parks and rural roads where we bird. As the song suggests, “this land is my land,” and I’ve got the tax receipts to prove it! 🤣
>The city has become notorious to a global audience due to YouTubers like Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt, who portrayed high streets filled with overflowing bins.<
There is a Birmingham cat owner with a YouTube channel - Tommy's POV - who puts a camera on his cat so people can see his quests to find a cat girlfriend. The cat is very popular but on most videos half of the comments are from foreigners, especially Americans, absolutely incredulous at how much rubbish and filth Tommy has to navigate during his adventures:
"Wow, there is so much garbage and trash. Doesn't anybody clean up their mess?"
"These homes and yards are terrible! They should be ashamed of themselves! Those poor cats living in all that garbage!"
"Jesus man where does this cat live......on the set of The Last of Us ?"
I'm glad you noticed the back-end reasoning behind the Singapore cleanliness campaigning - How they designed the city state to make it the safe, clean, liveable option for multinational investment in SE Asia is just one of the reasons the place is so fascinating (caning, chewing-gum and post-SARS table-top dancing planning included). Plenty more (as they say) in my book on Sg, "Singapore, Singapura", available in all good book stores etc etc.
"It seems instinctive for many people to see the growing problem of rubbish and equate it with spiritual and moral decline. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and the declining environment symbolises a country fallen in some way. It is true that garbage mounds suggest a population with little investment in wider society, and ‘private splendour, public squalor’ is a characteristic of low trust societies, the quintessential third world trait Lee wished to escape from."
The "Crisis? What Crisis?" ad used by the Thatcher Tories in 1979 did things like highlight the garbage pileups caused by things like regular strikes by government workers.
A few thoughts and observations on some causes of this (I must obsess about this too much):
- There is in general much more disposable 'stuff' than there ever has been, general product packaging and junk food wrappers an obvious one.
- Loose items go into recycling bins, contents often disgorged if they are left open meaning wind blows it out. Foxes get into open bins and helpfully spread contents around the neighbourhood.
- I sometimes get stuck following the recycling collection lorry and more often than not an item or two doesn't make it into the back of the lorry and the collectors don't bother picking it up. My pet peeve!
- Public bins in London are those stupid ones with the small, round opening on the side, you don't really want to put your hand into it and it's easy to miss putting your item in, wind then blows it away or some don't bother trying again.
- On busy roads into and out of the cities there are lots of tradesmen carrying materials on flatbed trucks where loose wrapping/polystyrene etc. flies off at speed so the verges get covered with it. I also read that there have been occasions where tradesman without a waste licence have been prosecuted for having empty junk food wrappers in their van so they're probably incentivised to dump them.
- A culture where people prioritise keeping their car as a spotless sanctum meaning rubbish is discarded out the window as soon as its content is consumed. This is very immigrant coded in my experience.
- There seems to be no provision at all for clean-up of the road verges, people see this driving around the place and maybe internalise that and apply to the rest of the environment.
- No provision for free commercial waste disposal or even the ability to take a commercial vehicle to a municipal dump. There aren't enough dumps and in London at least, the ones I am allowed to use are at the other end of the borough.
"A culture where people prioritise keeping their car as a spotless sanctum meaning rubbish is discarded out the window as soon as its content is consumed. This is very immigrant coded in my experience."
Good to know the dismal state inside my car is a cultural expression and not a personal shortcoming
I think it's low-public trust and pessimism more than an ethnic thing. Glasgow (and the urban West of Scotland generally) is still a relatively homogenous city but it has a massive litter problem in line with more ethnically diverse British cities.
"If I were advising Nigel Farage and he won the general election, the first thing I’d suggest is to invest in some heavy gloves and litter-pickers, and announce on day one that the entire country is going to be cleaned up. "
Since he is seriously planning on a US-style appointed cabinet rather than one made up elected MPs, Farage would likely make such appointments at his own personal discretion by and large.
Engaging in serious litter picking in my locality was when I started to become seriously aware that Britain had become a decadent and degenerate society. One is brought face to face with selfishness and insouciance. The lack of good parenting (no one who has a sense of stigma about dropping litter engendered into them in childhood will do this) is also obvious. I have thought very hard about the problem of this low-level antisocial behaviour and am pained by the degradation of the country I grew up in. I have tried hard to understand where it has come from. Litter is a symptom of a deeper malaise. I watched a TV program on the subject years ago in which a middle aged woman, frustrated by the despoiling of her town, was approaching people who dropped things in the street. One young man who had just tossed a cigarette end took exception to her asking him to pick it up and put it in a litter bin. “I’ll do what the fuck I want” he sneered at her. And that phrase summed up the problem we have: people have lost that sense of responsibility to others and their community; they have taken it upon themselves to behave as if no one else exists.
What is the solution? I do not believe that society can fix itself. Organisations, companies and countries which are bumping along the bottom can reform but it takes someone with exceptional leadership skills to make this happen. Do we have anyone like that?
Re: Britain has the worst litter problem in the developed world’
I hear your Britain and I'll raise you Baltimore. I would clean up in front of my house one day and the next day, like the stone of Sisyphus, trash would abound again. And we had regular incidents of dumping on vacant lots, or behind them. A trash heap left on the street behind me grew so vile, rat-ridden and fetid (apparently it included dead animals) that an auto shop on the street finally tricked a city councilman to come down and videoed him getting a good whiff of it, followed by a chewing out for the sanitation department's dereliction.
"while Keep America Beautiful scored some success with its famous ‘Crying Indian’ advert."
The Don't Mess With Texas campaign was very successful in reducing littering.
This piece brought to mind my own memory of reading a well-known book in the Arab world, “The Arabs Through Japanese Eyes”, authored by a Japanese orientalist. In it, the author appears almost obsessed with a particular question: why were the streets of many Arab cities—especially in the republics—so often marked by visible neglect, litter, and disrepair?
His bewilderment stemmed from an apparent contradiction. As an orientalist, he was well aware that both personal and public hygiene occupy an important place in Islam. Yet, he could not reconcile this with the stark contrast he observed between the meticulous cleanliness of the private homes of his Arab friends, and the deteriorating conditions of the cities in which they dwelled. This tension led him to put forward several possible explanations, among them the following:
He argued that the erosion of public hygiene reflected a deeper, collective sentiment among large segments of the population: a sense of alienation from the direction and governance of their own states. In such a context, civic responsibility weakens. Why bother to take care of streets and public squares when one’s voice carries little weight, elections are rigged, and the individual is reduced to a little cog within a corrupt, decaying, and indifferent state apparatus?
Syria was the worst country I’ve ever visited for trash. Egypt also bad. Apparently the gulf states like your own are the opposite?
I remember visiting Beirut last September, and it was a cultural shock -in terms of public hygiene-.
Yes, Dubai and other Gulf cities are so different. More should be done to increase green spaces in the cities, but yes, they appear so spotless compared to other places in the region!
It probably helps that it's 400 degrees outside in the UAE.
😅
Possibly the first thing I knew about Singapore was that it banned chewing gum because of the mess it causes.
Worth noting that Kemi took the Shadow Cabinet to clean up graffiti this week.
Once you notice the amount of the gum on the pavement you can’t un notice is, so I’m sympathetic to this one. Their ban on vaping on the other hand…
The little stickers people rip off vapes are a menace around here, along with the big nitrous oxide cannisters now.
"Monarchs have from time-to-time berated city authorities for the state of their streets, one of the first known being Edward III’s instructions to the City of London after the Black Death complaining about the filth. "
This being the Middle Ages it brings to mind a certain dialogue,
"Who's that?"
"Don't know. He must be a king."
"Why?"
"He hasn't got s*** all over him."
The unsparing Google Street View documents the UK's decline in tidiness, as I'm sure we all know. Sad but instructive. My Dad appears in Google Street View, incidentally, trying to clean up the out of control clutter on his property, which was so bad it could also be detected from space with satellite view. The internet never forgets, never forgives.
If it is any comfort, I lived in NYC in the early 1970's. When looking out the window of a taxi that was taking me to Laguardia, there was so much litter on the ground that you could not see the ground. Litterly. That has since improved.
I was only in the UK once on a business trip in the late 1990s (Bristol area) and was appalled by the amount of trash in the public spaces. My local colleague attributed this to the absence of litter receptacles caused by the IRA’s bombing campaign.
However, when I stooped to pick up a discarded candy wrapper, I was sharply reprimanded with, “We don’t do that here.”
Even today, in 2026, the litter receptacles in British rail stations are a ring of metal and a clear plastic bag . . . the IRA stopped being a hazard in 1999 . . . ugliness and insouciance!
I didn’t think the late 1990s were that bad for litter. More importantly, where were you going to put said ‘candy’ wrapper, when there were no ‘litter receptacles’? 🤔
In my pocket, of course. I often do this with small bits of ‘clean’ trash, until I can find a bin or go home.
If the 1990s weren’t that bad, I truly wouldn’t want to see the area today! I found it sad that people took so little pride in their city/country. I was taught that the state of one’s surroundings was a direct reflection of character and values (and messy desk, messy mind). England is beautiful (mostly), why trash it up?
Please see new comment below (aimed at your good self) 🙂
Well done you! I sometimes pick stuff up if there is a bin nearby, but that’s as far as I go. With litter generally, you should have seen London in the 1970s! And the buildings were all covered in soot…
I’ve been pondering your original comment today and have come to see that you are right. Outside big cities and their slums, Americans do have more civic pride than us Brits - and the US has more laws covering anti-social acts, as well as having more people empowered to and willing to enforce those laws. Here in Britain, we currently have major problems with cycling on the pavement/sidewalk, riding motorised scooters on the pavement, and allowing dogs to be dangerously out of control - people are being killed. They are all criminal offences, but the police almost never take action before a serious incident and many citizens actually approve of these anti-social acts, to the extent that they get angry when anyone tells them not to break the law!
I live near Boise, Idaho. The two groups who annoy me the most are the irresponsible dog owners (this town is totally dog-besotted) and mountain bikers, who expect hikers to jump aside when they barrel down trails in the foothills. OTOH, I am a birder, and almost everyone in my weekly birding group picks up trash in the parks and rural roads where we bird. As the song suggests, “this land is my land,” and I’ve got the tax receipts to prove it! 🤣
Great minds think alike!
>The city has become notorious to a global audience due to YouTubers like Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt, who portrayed high streets filled with overflowing bins.<
There is a Birmingham cat owner with a YouTube channel - Tommy's POV - who puts a camera on his cat so people can see his quests to find a cat girlfriend. The cat is very popular but on most videos half of the comments are from foreigners, especially Americans, absolutely incredulous at how much rubbish and filth Tommy has to navigate during his adventures:
"Wow, there is so much garbage and trash. Doesn't anybody clean up their mess?"
"These homes and yards are terrible! They should be ashamed of themselves! Those poor cats living in all that garbage!"
"Jesus man where does this cat live......on the set of The Last of Us ?"
I'm glad you noticed the back-end reasoning behind the Singapore cleanliness campaigning - How they designed the city state to make it the safe, clean, liveable option for multinational investment in SE Asia is just one of the reasons the place is so fascinating (caning, chewing-gum and post-SARS table-top dancing planning included). Plenty more (as they say) in my book on Sg, "Singapore, Singapura", available in all good book stores etc etc.
"It seems instinctive for many people to see the growing problem of rubbish and equate it with spiritual and moral decline. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and the declining environment symbolises a country fallen in some way. It is true that garbage mounds suggest a population with little investment in wider society, and ‘private splendour, public squalor’ is a characteristic of low trust societies, the quintessential third world trait Lee wished to escape from."
The "Crisis? What Crisis?" ad used by the Thatcher Tories in 1979 did things like highlight the garbage pileups caused by things like regular strikes by government workers.
Privatising rubbish collection is the one wholly successful outsourcing venture.
If f I were advising Nigel Farage, I'd suggest he film himself picking up litter as part of his campaign. Like Trump working at McDonalds.
A few thoughts and observations on some causes of this (I must obsess about this too much):
- There is in general much more disposable 'stuff' than there ever has been, general product packaging and junk food wrappers an obvious one.
- Loose items go into recycling bins, contents often disgorged if they are left open meaning wind blows it out. Foxes get into open bins and helpfully spread contents around the neighbourhood.
- I sometimes get stuck following the recycling collection lorry and more often than not an item or two doesn't make it into the back of the lorry and the collectors don't bother picking it up. My pet peeve!
- Public bins in London are those stupid ones with the small, round opening on the side, you don't really want to put your hand into it and it's easy to miss putting your item in, wind then blows it away or some don't bother trying again.
- On busy roads into and out of the cities there are lots of tradesmen carrying materials on flatbed trucks where loose wrapping/polystyrene etc. flies off at speed so the verges get covered with it. I also read that there have been occasions where tradesman without a waste licence have been prosecuted for having empty junk food wrappers in their van so they're probably incentivised to dump them.
- A culture where people prioritise keeping their car as a spotless sanctum meaning rubbish is discarded out the window as soon as its content is consumed. This is very immigrant coded in my experience.
- There seems to be no provision at all for clean-up of the road verges, people see this driving around the place and maybe internalise that and apply to the rest of the environment.
- No provision for free commercial waste disposal or even the ability to take a commercial vehicle to a municipal dump. There aren't enough dumps and in London at least, the ones I am allowed to use are at the other end of the borough.
"A culture where people prioritise keeping their car as a spotless sanctum meaning rubbish is discarded out the window as soon as its content is consumed. This is very immigrant coded in my experience."
Good to know the dismal state inside my car is a cultural expression and not a personal shortcoming
I think it's low-public trust and pessimism more than an ethnic thing. Glasgow (and the urban West of Scotland generally) is still a relatively homogenous city but it has a massive litter problem in line with more ethnically diverse British cities.
"If I were advising Nigel Farage and he won the general election, the first thing I’d suggest is to invest in some heavy gloves and litter-pickers, and announce on day one that the entire country is going to be cleaned up. "
Since he is seriously planning on a US-style appointed cabinet rather than one made up elected MPs, Farage would likely make such appointments at his own personal discretion by and large.