Most of us are, I think, temperamentally opposed to the idea of a society in which we are surveilled 24/7. We look at the proliferation of Ring doorbells, the thickets of CCTV cameras that capture our every trip to the shop from multiple angles, the algorithmic harvesting of our data by every website we use to shop, to exchange messages with friends, or to scour the wisdom of the internet for information, and we give a slight shudder of revulsion.

We are put in mind of the grim grey men in headphones listening in on bugged conversations for the Stasi in the grim grey film The Lives of Others. We look down the road to China, with its sinister social credit systems and its enthusiasm for biometrics. We think: yuk. We are not a nation, we think with a mild but palpable swelling of pride, of curtain-twitchers, looky-loos, busybodies and snitches.

Litter louts break the law because they simply can’t be bothered

How then, are we to respond to the proposal by Buckinghamshire council to invite drivers to use their dashcam footage to dob in fly-tippers and vehicular litter-louts? With more sympathy, apparently, than we might expect from the above. It is not, to adapt Mark Anthony, that we hate busybodies less, but that we hate fly-tippers more.

The situation, as it stands, is this. The grassy verges of that county’s pleasant country lanes are turning into a spiderweb of horizontal rubbish tips. Everywhere you look, the roadside is despoiled by rusty beer cans, the battered styrofoam containers of half-eaten Chinese meals, yellowing pop bottles, brittle pages from old newspapers, stained mattresses, claggy patches of emptied ashtrays, disposable vapes, shiny canisters of nitrous oxide, consumer durables that no longer endure, soggy prophylactics, and for all I know a small but significant number of unwanted stepchildren.

Such is the grievous state of local authority funding that armies of jolly, uniformed litter-pickers do not patrol these verges with bin bags and spiked sticks more than once a year, or at all. The rubbish just lies there. It accumulates faster than it can be cleared. So the council has hit on a solution. If you’re a motorist with a dashcam, and the car in front chucks a KFC carton out the window into the ditch, you’re invited to send the footage to a special unit which will log and assess it. If there’s a number plate visible, the keeper of the vehicle will get a £500 fine. No buts, no discount for quick payment, and it doubles if you don’t cough up within a month. Good. It’s too early to know if this will have a noticeable deterrent effect, but personally I’d be quite happy in this case with that less progressive aspect of judicial theory, revenge.

I feel, and I suspect the feeling is shared by many of us, a peculiarly powerful detestation of litter-louts. Theirs is not, in the scheme of things, the gravest of moral transgressions. The result of their thoughtlessness is an ugly nuisance rather than a threat to life or happiness or property. But the oafish triviality of the offence is what makes it so enraging. They don’t break the law out of a strong passion. They don’t break the law because they are suffering social exclusion, because they have a long history of structural trauma and economic disadvantage, or any of the other things that the bleeding hearted among us plead in mitigation for more serious crimes.

They break the law because they simply can’t be bothered. They can’t be arsed to put their lunch container in one of the rubbish bins that are plentifully and usefully supplied by all our taxes. They aren’t prepared to submit to the tiny inconvenience of arranging a collection for their old microwave. They think, instead: let it be someone else’s problem. Let someone else clear it up. I don’t care. Why should I? And in aggregate, as hundreds and hundred and hundreds of people take that attitude, something seemingly tiny becomes something very big. The countryside that we all enjoy then becomes an ugly, smelly, sad place.

The costs add up, too – not only in the despoliation of something beautiful that we all hold in common, but in pounds and pence. Buckinghamshire Council alone spends £3.5 million a year cleaning up litter; there was so much rubbish blocking a drainage ditch on the A412 in January the council had to spend £20,000 making the flooded roadway safe.

Littering is a fundamental refusal of the basic social contract. It is a small but telling instance of pure selfishness and contempt for your fellow citizens. It makes your problem everyone else’s problem. So, I find myself thinking, why the hell shouldn’t ‘everyone else’ band together to make it your problem again? I’m not the only one. A poll run by the Sunday Times under its report of the plan asked whether the public should be asked to snitch on litter louts, and at the time of writing it was 93 per cent in favour.

How then, do we square that with the aversion that most of us feel to the quasi-totalitarian surveillance society that the state and the big tech companies are erecting around us? Is it hypocrisy? Are we, in fact, after all a nation of curtain-twitchers, looky-loos, busybodies and snitches?  Is it not the right of the freeborn Englishman to chuck a tinnie from the car window without some bluenose taking prurient pleasure in anonymously narking him out to the feds?

I think a distinction can be drawn. The surveillance we’re talking about here is not surveillance on behalf of corporate or governmental power. It is surveillance of the people, for the people, by the people. It’s the nice sort of 24/7 surveillance – not the nasty sort that puts brave dissidents in jail or that seeks to fix elections. It is the sort that brings buttercups and meadowsweet back to the verges of our rolling English roads, and puts a deservedly nasty surprise through the letterbox of the boorish clot who dumped that old mattress in a layby.

Perhaps it’s my inner authoritarian talking, but to hell with those guys. May what begins in Buckinghamshire spread nationwide. Long live the snitches.