I am sure that the Queen disapproves of litter as much as anyone else, but she’s hardly ever exposed to it. There isn’t litter around at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor Castle or at any of her other homes. And when she goes away on a visit, her destination is always assiduously cleaned and tidied up in advance. She is, I suspect, almost the only person in Britain who barely knows what litter looks like. Yet we are all being asked to volunteer to spend the first weekend of March picking up litter everywhere in Britain to make the entire country clean before her 90th birthday in April.
My personal invitation to ‘Clean for the Queen’, as the campaign is called, arrived in the form of an email from the Northamptonshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), which is one of several organisations — Keep Britain Tidy, the Women’s Institute, and so on — that are backing the magazine Country Life in this initiative. ‘Will your village or group Clean for the Queen to celebrate her 90th birthday?’ it challenged.
There is no doubt that Britain has a serious and intractable litter problem; it is one of the most squalid countries on earth. And the problem with litter is that the more there is, the more it generates. If you see litter all over the place, you see no reason why you shouldn’t add to it. Why bother to look for a bin when nobody else does? What difference to the general scene would one more sandwich wrapper make?
The statistics tell a grim story. Thirty million tons of rubbish — enough to fill Wembley Stadium four times over — are collected from the streets of England every year; yet, despite all these efforts and recurrent campaigns to improve matters, it accumulates in ever larger quantities.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in