LITTER is symbolic of our selfish age. If LS Lowry returned to paint York scenes today, his stick men and women would be ankle deep in burger boxes, cola cans and sweet wrappers.

We could blame all manner of social trends for the mess. Our frenetic lifestyles fuelled by fast food; relaxation of parental and school discipline; the triumph of the individual consumer over collective responsibility.

But that lets the litter louts off the hook. Everyone knows that throwing rubbish on the street is wrong. But many do so without a second thought because their anti-social behaviour has been unchallenged for so long.

That is about to change. From Monday, street environment officers will be handing hand out a £50 fixed penalty to anyone who they see dropping litter.

This is an excellent initiative. For years civic-minded citizens have grumbled at the state of the streets. The temptation was always to reprimand the council for not doing enough to clean up.

The real blame lies with a wrapper-dropping, gum-spitting, can-tossing, food-strewing, paper-scattering, container-dropping army of ignoramuses.

To these serial bin-dodgers, the litter patrols and fines look set to be a culture shock. People stopped by enforcement officers in a trial run this week seemed amazed to have been reprimanded for something as supposedly trivial as, for example, dropping a cigarette butt.

Only a zero tolerance approach will be effective however. These patrols cannot be on every street, but once word gets round that they are serious about the £50 fines, people will start to think twice about discarding their rubbish.

Together with the York Pride extra street cleaning, and tougher rules on fly tipping, we could yet clean up this city.

Updated: 09:51 Thursday, April 15, 2004