Nice photo.
Of course, we had street cleaners in those days, employed by the local council. If there was rubbish in the street you used to phone Fred at the council yard and they'd come and clean it up. These days it's been outsourced to a private company who are out to make a profit and don't do a proper job.
Then there's council cutbacks thanks to austerity, plus the extra costs foisted on local government by the Tories such as social care, and keeping the environment clean goes to the bottom of a long list. Thank you the Tory party
People have always littered in this country going back centuries when they chucked rubbish out of windows into the streets. But the reason why people litter is a separate matter to cleaning it up, which has become a national problem. Travelling round the country it's easy to see that the entire nation has become a complete litter-fest eyesore.
Chris
The vast deterioration in sense of civic duty since the 60s would make the council’s job 10 times as difficult to keep the streets clean to the point of, as OOT says, requiring an army working round the clock.
Given a policeman recently cost the taxpayer £5,000 because he nicked a biscuit tin from his colleague and this required an investigation, what on earth would it cost us for a large-scale council project of constantly cleaning every street? Even Gove’s plastic bottle return idea is expected to cost £1 billion to set up and £1 billion per year after that. The expense of public sector services never ceases to make me light headed.
Which all leads to the current state of our national debt. £2 trillion, £2 trillion!! £2,000,000,000,000 successive governments have spent on public services that they simply didn’t have to spend. I’d be happy to have the council wipe my backside every day if the country could afford it but one thing Tory critics never seem to mention is the numbers, which simply don’t stack up.