Keep Britain free from litter yobs, or face the consequences

Monday April 12, 2010

Continuing his Reflections on a Free Society, Simon Hills, associate editor of The Times Magazine, calls for more civic awareness, enforced by the belief that with freedom comes responsibility

There is a notion I have when I see a discarded Kentucky Fried Chicken box on the street: I will pick up the box, apprehend the oaf who chucked it there and in a stiff voice intone: ‘You seem inadvertently to have dropped this. Here.’

I’ll drop the bones down the wretch’s shirt, smear the chips in his face and stick the box on his head. Then I’ll march him to the litter bin.

The fact is I’ve never seen a Kentucky Fried Chicken box-chucker in action. But that is what I’d do, if I wasn’t too scared. And I had my friends around me. And there were no CCTV cameras. Because this would be assault, right? And a free society doesn’t mean freedom to take the law into your own hands.

I have seen grown men chuck litter from their windows, though, and beeped my horn and flashed my lights at them. This gives me immeasurable pleasure. Some tattooed yob glares at me, makes wanker signs, jumps up and down in his car seat, gets more and more stressed. Then I pout, screw my eyes into a vacant expression and scratch my head in the manner of a chimpanzee.

Litter yob by this time is desperate to beat my head into a pulp, he’s apoplectic with rage and, I hope, his day has been diminished in some way equal to the way mine has reflecting how grown-ups will (1) act like three-year-olds and (2) despoil their immediate environment so wilfully.

And from the safety of my mass-produced box he can’t hurt me and no one’s going to haul me in court for assault.

Call me a coward for not picking on someone my own size, but what I have done is apprehend a teenager chucking his Coca Cola can on the grass outside the youth club and marched him to the litter bin. Porky little blighter he was, with a couple of fat friends.

At one point he stopped, and I gently nudged him towards the bin, an object as familiar to him as the inside of the Mir space station.

‘Oi,’ he moaned. ‘I could do you for that.’

‘That scares me about as much as a Sly and Gobbo from Noddy.’

The truth, though, is he probably could. Even worse, he knows it. Little fatty yob and his little fatty friends know all about their rights and entitlement. They have as much civic awareness as pigeons, but they are of the opinion that they are free to do with impunity pretty much as they like. And surely this is not a real freedom.

Teenagers of course have never been the most housetrained of creatures. With hormones jumping like jellybeans, slouching around in bus shelters and hanging around in menacing gangs has always been the hallmark of your adolescent.

Up until some time in the Sixties, though, their behaviour was tempered by the fact they were scared, basically, of grown-ups or coppers or anyone reporting them to their parents. Not so long ago, even yob dad would basically be on the side of the Old Bill.

If we’re to enjoy a free society we need to bring a bit of that back. If old people are to be allowed to leave their homes in the evening without being genuinely frightened, if our children aren’t to be stripped of their mobile phones by gangs of yobs, if we are going to maintain some sort of decorum in our civic life, then we need adults to be free to behave as adults.

Perhaps smearing a Kentucky Fried Chicken wing over some oaf’s face is going a bit far. But the nagging doubt that it might happen – and in front of your friends – is a far greater deterrent than any asbo.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine