These £75 fines make it feel like we’re living in a tin-pot dictatorship

Ihave a distinct feeling that it’s not working. That it can’t work. I’ve watched people wait until the ‘enforcers’ have passed before flicking their cigarette ends into the street, almost as a gesture of defiance.

We, perhaps foolishly, believe that we’re living in a free country: the sight of a couple of burly chaps striding down the High Street with video and sound recorders, Batman-type belts and the words ‘enforcement officer’ emblazoned on their backs does nothing to foster that dream.

With thirty-odd parishes, they’re going to have their work cut out if their job is to reduce littering across the whole borough. Relatively few people have complained about litter in the town centre. Many more have complained about heaps of rubbish piling up elsewhere.

In view of this, the absurd suggestion that the mere careless dropping of a cigarette butt warrants a penalty of £75 would perhaps win the approval of a tinpot dictator such as Robert Mugabe. Unbelievably, it apparently has the full approval of our council. It seems that a relatively few councillors comprising the ‘cabinet’ are the decision-makers, with the rank-and-file remainder merely being there to rubber-stamp the edicts of their masters.

A lady I know – a respectable and responsible soul who has raised a great deal of money for charity – was irritated by an overgrown verge past which she has to walk with brambles and other unfriendly plants launching their attacks, so she took it upon herself to sally forth armed with secateurs.

She chopped off some of the more militant tendrils and phoned the council to inform them of her good work. “You will have to clear it up,” they said. “It will be classed as garden waste and you will have to pay for it to be removed.”

‘Relatively few people have complained about town-centre litter’

Recently, I have noticed that many bus drivers show little regard for their passengers. Many jerk their vehicles into motion before passengers have seated themselves.

They then hurtle round bends, and very few are courteous enough to assist the elderly and infirm burdened with shopping to enter or alight from the bus.