litter

i can’t deny that i am a messy person, try as i might i cannot keep my space clean and tidy. i am the very definition of messy. i live with piles, stacks and heaps of stuff. no matter what i try to do to bring a bit of order into my life it soon descends into chaos.
i guess it is a case of love me love my junk.
yet there is a contradiction to this i can’t abide litter. it is a pet peeve. so many people just throw stuff on the ground with no respect to where they are. it annoys me,
it galls me, it aggravates.
stand tall, hackney council. stand proud.
in a move that is both faintly radical and faintly radical hackney council have a team
of eleven environmental enforcement officers patrolling the streets ready
to film and pounce on anyone they see dropping litter. they can issue
an on the spot fine of £80, failure to pay could lead to prosecution and
a fine of up £2,500. fiona fletcher smith, hackney’s corporate director
for neighbourhoods and regeneration describes the scheme as “bin it or
cop it”.
liberty have complained about the scheme seeing this as local
bureaucracy gone mad, while ‘keep britain tidy’ saw it as an unusual
measure.
you can see where liberty is coming from, we just don’t need more people with cameras snooping on us in the streets. hackney say that filming is necessary in order to provide an accurate record.
liberty ask why didn’t hackney think to put more litterbins out.
there is the rub, even when there is a bin a few paces away people will just throw rubbish in the ground. they don’t think about it, they just do it. people expect others to clean up after them, they don’t care that they have littered it is not an issue for them.
litter, it could be argued, is symptomatic of both the decline of standards in the uk and the growth of disposable consumerism. pretty much everything we buy is over packaged and that just leads to rubbish that needs to be thrown away.
so i have to side against liberty on this and with hackney council. it is not hard to hold onto rubbish until you find a bin, it just takes a certain amount of personal responsibility. if that personal responsibility is lacking then perhaps councils have to force it on miscreants who litter.
personally i don’t think they are going far enough. i wouldn’t bother with fines i would give them all community service and make them work as road sweepers (to be fair that was my second option, my first option involved a firing squad, and i felt that was a tad harsh).