Squalid Britain

When I arrived in Hong Kong last November I posted this impression:

I'll tell you one of the first things that struck me about it. If you come here from any city in Britain, what stands out is how clean the place looks: scarcely any litter, no graffiti, everything spick. It's unbelievable. You walk and you walk - as I did with my old buddy Ian - and you see see one stray piece of paper here, another a mile on, hardly anything.

I agree, therefore, with Jeremy Paxman's view about 'what a squalid place Britain has become'. On a train with WotN not long after I returned from my travels around Australia I drew her attention to the dense and continuous line of muck alongside the track. This was near Leeds. Today, on my walk, I thought I'd just count the pieces of litter I saw for a stretch: along the perimeter of Fog Lane Park on Parrs Wood Road, then in the park itself, finally on the road back home. I didn't bother with very small items, odd bits of damp paper, cellophane and what have you. Just the cans, bottles, cigarette packets, plastic bags, chocolate bar wrappers, polystyrene containers, chip wrappings, and sundry other delights. The tally was 206 items in about a mile and a quarter. Paxman's explanation? People 'feel free to throw rubbish around... [because] they do not feel the public realm is theirs'. But if this is the reason, why the great cultural variation between Britain and other countries with much cleaner public spaces?