ONE of our most serious social problems, after crime, drugs, dereliction etc, is street rubbish and dumping.

Is it just me, or has it really got much worse in recent years? I well remember the Keep Britain Tidy campaigns late last century and although they seemed very passive at the time, I do believe they made a difference and helped to educate a whole generation of youngsters in the need to keep their world in better shape.

Since then we appear to have descended steadily downhill. How often do you see children discard a wrapper from anything they are eating and simply drop it in the street?

They are rarely reprimanded because all too often they have watched their parents do exactly the same thing, often only feet from the nearest litter bin. Doesn't seem to make much difference that they are actually committing an offence.

Then there's the growing tendency to hurl anything unwanted out of the car window -- no matter whether they are passing through the most beautiful countryside, or through a town, or along a motorway, or past someone's front garden.

The weekly pile up gets more noticeable as you progress towards Saturday night and is usually a certain radius from the nearest takeaway, evidenced by the preponderance of plastic trays, pizza cartons and plastic drinking cups among the flotsam of paper, fag packets and sweet wrappers.

Yes, takeaways have certainly encouraged this throwaway generation. But they are not the major culprits. There are those with a weird, appalling mentality who feel that it is perfectly fine to drive out to our most delightful beauty spots in order to carelessly dispose of a settee, or a mattress, a carpet or an unwanted fridge.

Nothing gets me more angry than coming across one of these items dumped in a lay by when the culprits might have driven half the distance to leave it perfectly legally at a free council disposal site.

Worse still is finding you can't use the lay by at all because one of those builders from hell has chosen it to dump tons of unwanted rubble. Builders' rubble in the countryside is probably worse because it is rarely moved and just stays as an eyesore until nature's overgrown it half a century later.

I often wonder whether any of these culprits stop to think just what this world would be like if we all acted in this way. We'd all be pushing our way through a tide of non degradable rat and mouse infested garbage and there'd be no point in a nice country drive because there'd no no countryside worth looking at.

What kind of a world would we leave for our children? It is anti social behaviour in the extreme -- one which society is going to have to stamp on before it gets completely out of hand.

And this at a time when large sections of the public have never been more acutely aware of the need to preserve and safeguard our environment. Councils try their best to keep on top of the growing tide of litter and garbage dumping, but we are going to have to make it socially unacceptable to throw anything you don't want in the street or out of your car window.

At this point I have to give a big round of applause to all those unsung, socially conscious citizens who do their bit to reverse the trend by sorting domestic rubbish, regularly calling at bottle banks, and home composting as much as possible, encouraged by people like Friends of the Earth and Groundwork East Lancashire, who have done a marvellous job distributing free compost bins to people throughout the region in a bid to cut the pressure on landfill sites.

Recyclers Anonymous, I call them. And thank God we have such a publicly conscious force.

In Singapore, it is an offence to throw even a cigarette end or chewing gum in the street -- and it's been made to stick with severe fines. You could eat off the streets.

"It's a fine city," I remarked to a taxi driver as we drove through Singapore's avenues from the airport. "Yes it is," he replied. "You get fined for everything!"

Maybe that's what's got to happen here.