We are the pigs

Over the last few days our local council have been erecting these little posters on lampposts around the town. They all say things like "it's not the fast food, it's you" or "it's not the fizzy drink, it's you". Initially I thought these must be some "stop drinking so much" campaign, and I thought to myself that this might be more verbosely, but satisfyingly, expressed as: the reason why you puked all over the pavement, moron, wasn't because of that kebab and can of coke at the end of the evening but the 6 pints of cider and 3 WKDs. Now go home and sleep it off.

But in fact, on closer examination, the posters are an anti-littering campaign and, what's more, they carry a bald threat to fine people £80 for chucking their crap on the pavement.

This is good stuff, and very long overdue. However I have a few suggestions to make that might, in my opinion, have a more enduring impact.

1. Re-erect the stocks, they're in the town museum I should think. Put litterers in them with a sign inviting the populace to chuck half-eaten burgers at the wretched offender. Also that weird vivid red stuff in tinfoil that you see left on the bonnet of cars, the dregs of fizzy drinks, rusks that a baby has been gumming at for an hour but eventually grown bored of, maybe even a traditional rotten tomato or two. After an hour of this she or he would have to clean up all that mess before they could go home and have a wash. Or sit watching Jeremy Kyle all stinky and rank, if that's what they prefer.
2. Fine the fast food outlets and coffee shops and off licences £80 for every waxed paper cup, every polystyrene tankard of foul latté, every tinfoil slopbucket, every discarded can of Grolsch or shattered bottle of cheap vodka that can be traced from the sidewalk to their premises.
3. Instead of putting posters on every 10th lamppost how about attaching a... litter bin! Traditionally, of course, people either chuck their rubbish on the ground next to the bin, kick the bin to bits, or set light to it. But my third modest proposal should put paid to all that.
4. Pay a sharpshooter to roam the area in a car with darkened windows. He would have the right to randomly shoot people seen chucking their crap anywhere other than into a bin or who vandalise bins. It's unlikely to take more than a few good solid head shots for the littering scuzzers to realise that the odds have tipped out of their favour for good.

I'm not Richard Littlejohn, so I've stopped short of suggesting that offenders and their sons and their son's sons should all be strung up because it's the only language they understand. A little.

But if society genuinely doesn't want to drown in the polystyrene effluent of antisocial pigs then I really do think that litterers  - and those that condone what they do, the fast food outlets in particular, should be shamed into changing their ways and forced to make amends for their disgusting behaviour.