TRADERS in Clitheroe are upset over the town's streets being messed up with gobbets of discarded chewing gum.

But it is a blight on towns everywhere. And it is one that is getting worse, according to councils who have the task of trying to clean it up.

The cause, of course, is a downright anti-social attitude. Would those who spit out gum in the streets do the same in their own homes? Of course not.

But short of going to the extreme, like that of Singapore, and banning chewing gum altogether or slapping a special tax on gum to pay for cleaning it up, should not something else happen?

For as things stand at present, all that is being done is appealing to people's better nature and asking them to discard their gum properly.

Plainly, this does not work.

The disgraceful state of pavements everywhere is proof of that.

But it is not as if we do not have laws against littering in this county - and spitting out gum is just that - but that they are so seldom used.

It would only take the fining of a few gum-spitting morons or any other sort of litter-bugs for the message to get through to the anti-social - and for the streets to start getting much cleaner.

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