IT’S hard to think of anything more anti-social than letting your dog foul on pavements, in parks or places where children play.

Well actually perhaps there is.

How do you rate someone who clearly feels that it’s wrong not to scoop up the mess, so they bag it ¬– and then hang the package from a tree branch at eye height?

Then there are the people you see chucking takeaway cartons out of car windows or just dropping them in the street.

You are bound to wonder what their own homes and yards must look like if they show no qualms about acting like this in a public place.

I’m all for the idea of trying to shame people into taking on some basic responsibility for keeping their own town or borough clean.

Even if some deluded souls may have had the idea in the past that someone else would tidy up after them, local government cutbacks mean that there are fewer and fewer workers to do basic street cleaning.

Blackburn with Darwen council’s plan to prosecute lazy dog-owners and then display their names and faces on posters as an example to deter others is a good one-off idea.

But let’s not get carried away.

There have to be limits to the use of public humiliation as a weapon for changing behaviour.

No one wants us to reach the sort of situation you get in one-party states (of the right and left) where area committees of jumped-up petty officials wield enormous power over everyday lives and enforce conformity and uniformity.

That’s what happens in North Korea and China. And at the other end of the political spectrum in squeaky clean Singapore you can be arrested and fined for all kinds of misdemeanours.

I still remember many years ago when all the city state’s post offices carried a sign which read: “Long-haired men will always be served last”.

And reprehensible though it is not to flush the toilet after use do we really want to have public conveniences where a recorded voice tells everyone in the place that you’ve failed to do just that?

By all means let’s give lazy, thoughtless folk a nudge in the right direction but don’t let the sort of people who really relish running neighbourhood watch schemes have so much power that they begin telling us all what colour we have to paint our front doors.