UKH

As usual, the moment the sun comes out so do hoards of people with the intention of getting hammered in the local park and no intention of taking their trash home or to the nearest bin.

How do we stop this happening? My starter for 10 would be that we leave the rubbish there for a while for these morons to savour for a while rather than spending a fortune clearing up only for it to happen again in a few days.

Maybe, through sober eyes and in the light of day some of these people would notice the mess they've made and change their behaviour.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Rubbish left, just invites more rubbish 

In reply to gethin_allen:

Not a chance, those that don't care will just sit in the filth or go elsewhere when they've finished trashing the place.

Unfortunately, the only option (other than dobbing people in for dumping which you absolutely should do) is for the people who do care to do it ourselves

In reply to gethin_allen:

I get where you are coming from, but how is that fair for those that weren't out on the piss last night?

It might be worth it as a one off exercise, but I doubt it will make selfish tw@ts less selfish.

There does seem to be a scarcity of bins in public spaces, and those there are often aren't emptied often enough (e.g. my local park has a dog poo bin that has been overflowing for 2 weeks now).

In reply to gethin_allen:

I have politely pointed out to people in the past that they should, and could easily, take their litter away. It may at least shame a few into bringing a rubbish sack on the next occasion. However be prepared for  a few verbally aggressive responses. 

In reply to gethin_allen:

I have been tackling our local reservoir for the last year.

What I have learnt so far is that it definitely helps to remove rubbish. It doesn't stop it. If you leave the rubbish, fewer people go to enjoy the place so people feel even more at liberty to trash it because no one else is there to spot them doing it. 

We now have a group of us who have come together to work on the issue. We are liaising with the community council and land owners. We are building really good relationships and co-operation. 

We are looking at signage. I am aiming not mention litter in the signage at all, or tell people what not to do. I am aiming for positive messages to encourage people to work with us to preserve the beauty of the area. Things like "clean spaces make happy faces", "with great access comes great responsibility (check out the Scottish Outdoor Access Code)", (by the dam wall) "This is a dam good view, let's keep it that way". Maybe some signs about the different wildlife that is around at different times of year too. 

Basically we are trying to give the place a cared for feel to give others a reason to care for it and create an atmosphere where the party groups don't feel like the space is all theirs. 

I accept we probably won't solve all the problems, but by growing our group of volunteers and keeping things positive I hope we can keep as many users as possible caring about the place and create a precident on accepted behaviour. 

In reply to Blue Straggler:

Sorry, that reads like a generic platitude. Just to elaborate a little bit - my house is on a canal towpath, I don't have a private garden and don't own any outdoors space, there is a small patch of grass with an apple tree right outside my kitchen door (my kitchen is the only room at canal level). I am also at a bridge, i.e. a road and pavement are right outside my front door at street level, and steps down to the canal go right past my lounge window. 
It's a all mildly popular place for folk to loiter and inevitably this results in litter being left. Beer cans in the "garden", various other rubbish on the steps. Having lived here 17 years I definitely know that if I try to ignore it, it just piles up. So I've basically taken to acting like Wall-E, especially with beer cans in the garden. Just go out and clear them. I am not eagerly looking forward to the summer but I know what I was getting into when I bought this house and I just have to grit my teeth. 
I would say that clearing 4 of 5 beer cans per weeks saves me from clearing 13 beer cans and a load of other rubbish per week...

In reply to gethin_allen:

Littering in the central belt is a huge problem and I doubt it will ever go away. My wife and I do a monthly clear up of the main A road a few hundred yards either side of the track into our row and we've barely blinked before it needs doing again.  Fly tipping is also on the increase with every pull-in to the forestry now sporting it's resident mattress or refrigerator. Proud Scots indeed!  Needs more CCTV and proper punishment (needles in fingernails sort of thing IMO). 

In reply to gethin_allen:

I'm part of our local litter picking group - now up to about 70 people, with someone out pretty much every day.  The Council provides purple 'community litter picking' bags and picks those up during the week.  The tally must be about 1,300 bags over the past 6 months or so.  

The litter is a ceaseless tide.  There is a huge amount of historic litter which is being steadily removed as foliage has died back over the winter.  Then there's the food on the go - coffee, yoghurt drinks, sandwich wrappers, crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, beer bottles and soft drink cans and endless fast food and red bull.

Then there's domestic and trade fly tipping on a large or small scale.

Then, let us say there are interesting rubbery items for which a litter-picker the length of a barge pole would be useful, which is a fair description of some of those items.

And dog poo bags.  The stupidity of the dog poo dumpers ****ing defeats me.  One person who was challenged actually said, "I thought you were allowed to leave them there because there isn't a bin",

Still, on the upside, the whole area looks so much better.  My wife and a friend were out picking when a car pulled up, a man got out and gave them a bottle of champagne each to say thank you.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Litter wardens with big sticks and the authority to give a good thrashing to the scruffy bastards.

Or a publicity campaign. I remember adverts on TV as a kid about taking your litter home or put it in a bin. Blue planet did a great job on plastic use so start showing wildlife struggling due to the crap people dump. 

In reply to gethin_allen:

More Wombles

In reply to gethin_allen:

As I've broken the "40 barrier" I am now in full old man mode. As a family, we litter pick our street once a week as a minimum, and have managed to do a decent job getting a lot of the "historic litter" out of the bushes near the tram over winter. We are main thoroughfare for kids to the high school (who get most the the litter blame) but anecdotal evidence (and some heated conversations) lead to taxi and delivery drivers. Some one locally seems keen on making a lot of chantilly cream as well......

I was of the "more bins" camp but am leaning towards the "no bins, you carried it here, you can carry it home" camp. We should be moving away from a disposable culture.

In reply to gethin_allen:

I once went to a beach in Albania, a popular picnic spot that you even needed to pay to drive into. When there I noticed an irregular pattern of roughly 3m diameter clearings in the otherwise pretty uniform blanket of discarded rubbish.

Turned out people came for picnics, cleared themselves a spot, then just left all their rubbish behind when they were done.

In reply to john arran:

This makes me want to cry 🙁

In reply to nniff:

Last week my daughter posted a photo of a deflated 'lady doll' on facebook. It was taken whilst walking her kids to primary school through what could be thought of as a respectable estate. 

In reply to gethin_allen:

I wish I had a solution. I don't know if people who leave rubbish just don't care  - ie they know what they are doing an either couldn't care less and think some one else will clear it, or if they don't realise they are doing it, ie throwing away anything from a sweet wrapper to a meal container/bottle/can is just normal for them.

Close to us is an area used for Sunday football and after most matches it would be almost possible to define the football pitches by the lines of rubbish.

One weekend a few years ago, I thought things might improve because the organisers had placed a dustbin behind each goal and at either side of the centre line, of every pitch. It made virtually no difference to the amount of rubbish thrown on the ground even though everyone was only a few yards from a bin.

I also wondered what would happen if the rubbish was just left(perhaps netted down to stop it blowing away but, as said elsewhere here, I fear some would just sit down somewhere else and leave their rubbish there.

Dave

In reply to gethin_allen:

old curmudgeon alert - I'll be 60 this summer. When I was young there seemed to me to be a lot less rubbish - You certainly wouldn't notice litter when out for family drives or picnics in the countryside.*  I'm guessing that was most likely due to there being much less superfluous packaging. Most things came in paper that would go on the fire and drinks came in glass bottles that we'd take back to the shop for sixpence. Only tin cans and the odd crisp packet would end up in the bin.  However, I also think that the majority attitude back then was to Keep Britain Tidy as we were bombarded with public information films (once we had a TV) and if I ever threw a sweet wrapper away I'd get a good clout round the ears off my dad. Rose tinted spectacles probably

* Following the A706 from Forth to Whitburn yesterday (as an example) the amount of litter was astonishing.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Awful isn't it.  Dovestones national park last night was covered in shit.  Bins were fill, so there's just mounds of it piled all around the bases.

At least they tried to get near the bins.  Some scruffy kunts had just dumped it where ever they had been sitting.

Bends my head.  you're actually going somewhere specifically because it is beautiful but then you see fit to trash it.

On a slightly unrelated note we had the local litterpicking group collect a ton of crap from the local area and bag it up for the council to collect the next morning.  Few residents raised hell because they had left the bags on the kerb outside their house.  What a kick in the teeth to give up your free time to help clean up the area only to be called out for leaving the stuff in plain sight.

Apparently the group has been told that the council can't give them any labelled bags to use because "it's not cost effective".  f*ck sake.

In reply to john arran:

That doesn't surprise me, Albania is a very dirty country with litter absolutely everywhere, so people are just used to it.  It's mainly because the place is so poor they can't afford to pay for it to be cleaned up, though they could always consider not dropping it to start with.

In reply to ThunderCat:

On the other hand, our council does provide distinctive bags and the council officer responsible has been delighted by the difference it has made.  Conversely,  however, it's making a significant impact on his budget - for disposal rather than the bags.  There was therefore a brief hiatus in collections by the Council, during which I suspect he told the councillors that it was their responsibility, as representatives of the people, to tell the litter pickers that the council wasn't going to pick the bags up any more.  I suspect that they couldn't see that going well in any way at all.

The original allocation of hi-viz and litter-pickers is now being augmented by local business providing those and hoops.

On the down side, we now have a self-appointed little Gauleiter who has taken it upon herself to alienate as many people as possible through the medium of Bookface and ill-considered interviews with the local press.  Still, it will be nice when litter picking can start and finish at the pubs again.

PS - as in insight into the 'tossers', what kind of mouth-breathing imbecile throws bottles and cans from moving vehicles at ladies picking up litter at the side of the road?  This happens fairly regularly.

In reply to nniff:

perhaps she needs to be told that she "has no authority here"

there is a horrifying amount of litter along every rural road I walk along at the moment - you could almost imagine someone dropped a supertanker's worth for an airburst to spread it everywhere - it's not just hotspots any more though they are worse than they have been

a lot must just be thrown out of the window but to build up this quantity some people must be doing it on every journey.

In reply to wercat:

I think that is probably the case - there seems to be a pattern - you get 'breakfast rubbish' and the evening fast food in similar places on the lanes.  The faster, more 'though-routes' just get a continual stream of everything that takes about two weeks on average to build up to 'visually offensive'.

In reply to john arran:

It's like that 'broken windows' thing - if you turn up and the place is a mess, then you will leave it that way and feel less guilt about contributing to it. 

In reply to gethin_allen:

Escalation: a range of options from Limmy here:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjByy1Sf4XE&

In reply to gethin_allen:

As soon as the sun comes out with us, locals head to the river and the overwhelming rubbish is from the Macdonalds round the corner. Maybe fast food should take more responsibility for their waste as a start point. 

In reply to graeme jackson:

When I was visiting Denmark there was a 1 krone (12p) deposit on all bottles or drinks cans. This ensures almost all are returned either by the purchaser or by people collecting them and returning them. 

In reply to supersteve:

Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to give out disposable packaging at all. If there was a £1 refundable deposit on reusable containers, rather than free styrofoam landfill fodder, I wonder how much less waste would be created, and how much less litter there would be nearby.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Last year a friend of mines daughter witnessed a family by the banks of the Wharfe  clear up all their rubbish after a picnic, put it in a bin-liner and chuck it in the river.....staggering

In reply to stevieb:

just like the Corona Lemonade bottles we had in the 60s/70s!

In reply to gethin_allen:

The amount of litter out there really gets me down.  It’s an issue in so many places and I see it as a reflection that a portion of society do no care about others, the environment or consider any consequences.

There must be some research and science out there around how to turn this around?

I’d love to catch the perpetrators and post it back through their letter boxes.

In reply to gethin_allen:

A friend of a friend suggested on facebook today some vigilante action, in the form of going around in a large group with a loud bell, and chanting 'SHAME SHAME SHAME' while ringing the bell, and lurking next to or following anybody who dropped litter in a local park, I quite like the idea even with the risks.

Seems vaguely medieval, somehow, or like it's from centuries ago...

In reply to afx22:

My partner has picked kgs of rubbish off the river bank and verges during lockdown while furloughed, she gets praise from passers by but rarely do any of them help. 

Away from town in rural parts there is a dichotomy between clean, or terrible.  The terrible is either fly tipping or clearly just ta few bad eggs. Same road corner , same type /brand of rubbish, pop cans, or fast food, or booze bottles.  I’ve come to the conclusion some people throw it out before they get home to avoid being caught by partners.

On one of my cycle routes there is probably  a local drink driver whom throws out empties regularly along the same stretch, dozens and dozens of empties in the ditch over a mile or so.

I haven’t a solution, other than to make all packaging truly degradable, but if we did that we’d end up with farmers growing another monoculture crop, which itself could be an ecological problem.

In reply to ScraggyGoat:

This would, I fear, sadly result in MASSES of rubbish slowly rotting, everywhere, as it gives the signal that you don't need to worry about putting it in the bin. 
Tangent alert and this is not an anti-cyclist rant....a former colleague of mine circa 2009 took up cycling and instantly went full MAMIL and was going on about how bananas are a perfect food for his awesome road biking because you can just throw the peels away and they will biodegrade. 

I gave him my opinion of this attitude, and in response he sent me a link (to a cycling forum!) "proving" the acceptability of this activity....

In reply to gethin_allen:

A lovely spring evening at Baslow after work today. Got a few easy routes ticked, but sort of spoilt by the amount of litter around. Helpfully people had left bags behind so I filled those up including two bags of dog shit. I don't have a dog, so maybe I'm missing something here but quite how stupid do you have to be put something gross but ultimately biodegradable into a plastic bag thus rendering it not biodegradable, then just chuck it in the heather? Why even bag it in the first place?

No bins in Curbar Gap car park either, so had the added joy of putting someone else's dog shit in my car and taking it home to put in my dustbin.

In reply to gethin_allen:

I get really depressed about this. I don't think there is a single solution as there isn't a single cause. Some of it is people who just don't think, and some of it is proper scum who just don't care.

For the former I think that social pressure can help. When I'm at the crag I pick up litter, but I make sure I'm seen doing it. I think that if people see someone else picking up then they might think twice about dropping it.

For the scum that don't care we need to get serious. Proper sentencing for fly tippers, crackdowns with surveillance at hot spots. What I'd really like to see is a traceable mark on all packaging from fast food places. The shop gets fined for any of their rubbish illegally dumped. You can bet they'd work on their customers to improve their behaviour if that happened. Or go out of business. Either way it's a win.

In reply to john arran:

I would be interested to see whether the introduction of discounting at high street chain coffee shops for using your own mug, has made any noticeable impact. Personally I get some medium-sized pangs of guilt if I buy a Costa Coffee (or whatever) in a disposable cup, but I am from a certain demographic. Other demographics (or people in my same demographic, like most of my colleagues) think nothing of it....

In reply to Hooo:

As for bags of dog shit... Registration of all dogs with DNA records. Any shit found in a bag they trace the owner. Fine for a first offence. Second offence dog destroyed and owner banned from owning another.

In reply to Hooo:

Most of it is scum who just don't care, and have a sense of entitlement that 'someone' will clear up after them. If you tackle them you will get "I'm making work for someone", if you don't get a stream of obscenity or threats of violence.

A week's community service litter picking for those caught. And that includes those who leave offerings for the dog shit fairies.

And we need public information films that stress that if you drop litter, you're a disgusting shit.

I think 'sense of entitlement' is a growing problem in so many spheres of British life.

In reply to Hooo:

Not the dog's fault. Destroy the owner...

In reply to TobyA:

Someone has gone out of their way (by a few metres...) to chuck stuff in a hole in the rocks.

In town near me, there are seats, and a bin a few metres away. The lazy f*ckers can't even be bothered to walk a few metres to chuck stuff in the bin; it's just dumped on the seat, or on the floor by the seat.

In reply to gethin_allen:

There's a stretch of wasteland on my cycle commute that gets used for fly tipping and general "open your car doors and dump the rubbish out of it" littering.  The local Wombles pulled about a ton of rubbish out of it a while back and it's so sad to just see it all building up again.  Like everyone else it just does not compute in my head that people can do this and live with themselves. But then there's a lot of things people do that I don't understand.  

In reply to captain paranoia:

I think you're right. Sense of entitlement is a major part of it. Someone else picking up their crap is a service they have come to expect.

So, a major public information campaign and some proper enforcement is required. But this will never happen in the UK, because the entitled scum run the country and freedom to be an arsehole has a greater priority than consideration for others.

I've heard that in Singapore if you drop a fag butt you're likely to get caught and get a hefty on the spot fine. And chewing gum is illegal. 

In reply

My suggestion for "solving the rubbish problem" is not complicated. Hire more people to remove rubbish. If you don't want to pay for that, you're going to be stuck with the rubbish 

A secondary note is to support the volunteers who clear rubbish in every possible way 

In reply to supersteve:

Two decades ago so it hopefully has changed; I once commented to an employee at a McDonalds about the radiating trails of trash that went out from the store he worked in into the parks and beaches nearby and his reply was 'product placement'....

In reply to gethin_allen:

It really does annoy me how thoughtless and careless some people are. It's always bothered me, but I've noticed it a lot more since getting a dog - what used to just be an eyesore is now a potential cut paw or upset tummy for him.  My local area isn't too bad compared to some places, but still if you stand basically anywhere in one of the parks or on one of the streets you will be able to see at least one piece of rubbish - it is absolutely everywhere! 

If I catch anyone in the act then I intend to challenge them (as long as it's not a group of teenagers late at night etc), but it's very rare to actually see it in progress. I remember a few years ago beeping my horn at a car in front of me that chucked a bottle out of the window at some traffic lights - at the time all that happened was they decided it would be amusing to crawl along at 5mph for a bit, but who knows maybe it will have given them pause for thought later on (I can dream, can't I!) 

I think there could be a lot more in the way of public information campaigns, but other than that just has to come down to people collecting it! Not going to be paid for by the council with local government finances what they are so it has to come down to volunteers really. Councils could do more to provide areas at parks etc to drop collected litter off though (the bins are full most of the time) so a) you can collect more than one bag-worth and b) so you don't have to carry it home and use up your own bin space. 

Personally I do occasionally take a litter picker out and like to think it makes a small difference to my local area, although I could do it more often.

The most disgusting 'litter' I've come across is near a canal, where a little while ago a broken old portable toilet filled with human excrement appeared on a little path leading onto it. This was taken away a couple of days after reporting it, but since then human excrement has occasionally started to appear on the path. Not sure what the source is, but suspect it may be one of the canal boats moored nearby which looks like it's in a state of disrepair (so possibly the source of the broken toilet) but still seems to have people living on it. No way I'm cleaning that up though! 

In reply to Blue Straggler:

I'd rather see the brown banana skins in the hedges (which will eventually degrade) than the gel wrappers I see people dropping and which really won't ever degrade. 

I don't understand why some punter cyclists use loads of gels, I take one in my pocket for an emergency but they taste grim and aren't good on the stomach.

A good cycling snack in Colombian dillitos boccadilos (sp?) They are fruity sugary lumps that come wrapped in a leaf that just crumbles to almost nothing and can be thrown in a hedge.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Because manufacturers have convinced them the reason they struggle after 30mins of exercise is low calorie intake, not because they are unfit. 

In reply to TobyA:

Well done on yesterday at Baslow - that is really appreciated. 

I did the same while climbing at Hill Hole quarry yesterday. Mainly nitrous oxide cylinders and broken glass. Plus a bag of beer cans and bottles neatly tied up and left on the grass for someone else, which then leaked all over the boot of my car on the drive home. Marvellous.

Fortunately no dog poo bags but I wouldn't have picked them up anyway. Sorry, I draw the line. 

Lots of kids, dog walkers, youths etc saw me and another gent was doing the same so I like to think we may have switched on a dim light bulb somewhere. 

By coincidence I found out yesterday that our local council now have a public space order which makes it illegal to consume alcohol in any local spaces. Quite draconian and it makes me a bit uneasy (I've had the odd champagne picnic) but If enforced that would probably reduce the litter problem. 

In reply to captain paranoia:

Last summer I found a load of plastic bottles, cans, food containers. I thought bloody, lazy so and sos until I realised the rubbish was in the middle of a patch of nettles, so someone had collected their rubbish from wherever they had sat and thrown it somewhere else. Even more annoying the rubbish was by a wall on the other side of which, and within a walk of about a minute, was a petrol station with a waste bin outside.

I think there is a lot of truth in the comment that some people feel entitled to do whatever they want whenever they want. Somehow we need to change the way people think about what they do but I don't know how.

Dave

In reply to AukWalk:

I saw a couple walking on the footpath by a busy junction. I was in a car queuing at the lights. The unhealthy looking man finished drinking something and chucked the bottle into the woods by the footpath. It is a WTF moment! As you say, rarely seen.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Promoting a culture of filming littering would be more productive than clearing it up.

In reply to gethin_allen:

My theory, which I believe to be quite sound but then I am biased because it’s MY theory, is that bananas have been a “gateway drug” to the entitlement of (ahem) “performance cyclists” to throw away ANYTHING 

In reply to Cobra_Head:

I think the problem is that too many people think that the 'Wombles' will take care of it for them.

In reply to Blue Straggler:

If there is one thng that gets my goat it's the people who dump banana and orange peel on paths/meadows muttering 'it's biodegradable. Bury it deep in a hedge or under a rock or take it home.

In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:

'Bury it deep in a hedge or under a rock or take it home.'

Nope; just take it home. It's a simpler message and it's the right thing to do.

In reply to Tringa:

Curiously, on the few occasions that I have caught people littering and called them for it, they have been embarrassed and acknowledged they were in the wrong, and dealt with it - why did it take me to point it out?

This is purely subjective, but s my impression that 40 years ago the French Alps were a mess, and we were OK; nowadays it seems the situations is completely reversed.

In reply to Tringa:

It can't help that the people in government routinely appear to take the attitude that doing whatever the fcuk they want is completely fine as long as they don't get caught, charged and convicted. And what are the chances of that for local littering, if it isn't even happening for blatant deceit and corruption on a national scale.

In reply to john arran:

Remember being horrified by litter in Greece 30-20 years ago. Much worse here now, especially verges

In reply to john arran:

A fellow lover of the countryside once told me he had asked a group who were sitting in an area festooned with rubbish, and also adding to it, why they did it. "What litter?" Where?" was the reply.       

In reply to Blue Straggler:

The big races are changing the rules about littering. I think they are going to have dedicated litter drop zones and anything beyond that the riders will be fined. 

Riding a sportive in Pembrokeshire I was following a chap who was taking it all a bit too seriously (aero everything and wannabe cycling superstar doing a 80 mile sportive) he took a gel and then fumbled putting the wrapper in his pocket, then a very short time later ANOTHER gel (must have missed breakfast because we were only about 20 miles in) and this time just chucked the wrapper, indicating that the first fumble was likely just a decoy. 

At this point I was fuming angry and just had to have a go at him, letting him know that we were in a national park and the organisers said that any littering would be an immediate disqualification. Unfortunately, I then had to make a big effort to get off the front of him and not have to hang around with him.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Reopening Spoons' beer gardens will solve a lot of it.  Most of these people are used to the bar staff cleaning up after them.

In reply to gethin_allen:

We should bring back crucifixion*. Nail 'em up I say! Nail some sense into 'em

* for the first offence

In reply to wercat:

You see it frequently, people finish their takeaway or drinks then just drop the packaging out the window. Worst of all it's often families, the kids have to actively unlearn being raised by scruffy cnuts, if they ever do.

My back lane commute is plagued by flytipping, mostly looks like builders and unlicensed removals people though there's a tyre fitter or mechanic in on the act too. Sometimes they're 'considerate' enough to dump it in the ditch or a gateway but often they just tip the truck in the carriageway and f**k off. Some temporary ANPR cameras along the road and signs appealing for immediate reporting (to narrow down the time window) would be well worth the council's investment.

jk

In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:

If done intelligently all three options are acceptable.

In reply to gethin_allen:

Fines need to be eye watering. Countries like Singapore have huge fines for littering and the streets are clean. I'd also like to see anyone littering from their car getting said car confiscated.

Councils are culpable too. They charge small companies who take their rubbish to a tip, so it's logical to dump it in a lane to avoid charges. If companies that manufacture rubbish ( otherwise known as packaging) were taxed for producing it, that money could be used to pay people a small amount for delivering their rubbish to a tip. If aluminium cans and plastic bottles had a small return fee payment on them they could be returned to the supermarket for cash. Kids would be picking up plastic and cans to claim the cash. Years ago lots of bottles could be returned for a fee. 

Finally laws need to be enforced. Hardly anyone ever gets caught for littering. Again if packaging was taxed then money would be available to provide cctv in hotspots, and enforcement officers to catch offenders.

Can you see this government acting. For gods sake don't hold your breath.

In reply to Root1:

Since almost everything would have the offenders fingerprints and or DNA on it somewhere, I've occasionally idly fantasised about some branch of enforcement that could pick up the evidence and fine people accordingly. The income generated would probably finance the massive bureaucracy required.
There's a few flaws, but maybe it'd be worth a go before resorting to crucifixions at park gates

In reply to nufkin:

Crucifixions would be cheaper.

Whilst walking in to town for food shopping this evening, I was musing on the rise of low-level criminality: littering, cycling on pavements (I'm looking at you, Deliveroo riders), and e-scooters.

But then there aren't any police on the streets, because the 'party of law and order' has become the 'party of bunging contracts to mates'.