Why Clean for the Queen When We Can Live In Beautiful Filth?

A few obvious points about Clean for the Queen, the community initiative in which we're all commanded to spruce up our cities ahead of the Queen's birthday this weekend. First, the publicity photos released by the campaign, in which frontline politicians appear with purple T-shirts and high-vis jackets on top of their shirts and ties, as if this is somehow normal, really are the stuff of nightmares. Boris Johnson looks oafish and threatening, a drool-smeared Benjy Compson figure with his wobbly cat-torturer's grin. Environment minister Rory Stewart has come as some kind of lopsided Cockney stereotype, a chipper lad who'll stab you in the throat and shuffle away with his hands in his pockets, whistling a merry tune. But Michael Gove is the worst, a steely ghoul, fully terrifying, his little grin sharpened to rip out your heart. Then there's the branding: it's all in the style of those awful Keep Calm posters, something writers such as Tom Whyman and Owen Hatherley have described as a worrying attempt to marshal the forces of twee nostalgia in the service of contemporary austerity. Finally, as most of the liberal commentariat has noticed, the whole thing is hideously condescending: clean up your filthy streets, peasants, your betters are having a birthday.

But there's something strangely timid about these condemnations: yes, of course litter is bad; yes, of course it's good for us all to muck in and clean up the streets, but slapping the Queen all over this project only ruins its good intentions. Which is nothing less than capitulation. Someone needs to come out and say it: litter is good. And cleaning up, the insistence on shining sterility, the mad-eyed primness of this strange Lady Macbeth ritual, is the sign of a deep social sickness.

The best argument for the pro-littering front comes from the Daily Mail's Toby Young, who has written a fantastically bizarre rebuke to the metropolitan liberals sneering at this honest attempt to tidy up our little island. What kind of person cares so deeply about litter? He might not have intended to, but Mr Young has given us a darkly fascinating portrait of this person. After lambasting the cosseted bourgeoisie (who, he informs us, don't care about litter because they can just pay people to clear it up for them – a populist class analysis strangely undermined by his characterisation of litterbugs as 'yobs'), he delivers a few tales of his own personal heroism.

"When I first moved to Acton," he writes, "I appointed myself the unofficial litter monitor on my street. Every evening, you can see me with a pair of Marigold gloves on, picking up fast-food containers, empty cigarette packets and discarded tissues." And you can already see it, can't you: the school prefect who never really grew beyond sixth form, still out looking for a big teacher figure to suck up to, combing the streets for fag-ends in the name of the law. There's a tinge of power-lust to these strange and intrusive escapades – he writes that he hoped to "lead by example, with the local population becoming more conscientious as they saw me hard at work, but I've been disappointed" – but its core is something far more gruesome: the need to suck up to power, coming from adult man who still wants his gold star for special boys.

Something's very askew with the priorities here. Of all the many ways in which human beings are systematically wrecking everything that surrounds us, the blight of urban litter is by far the least consequential and the most petty. Condoms and crisp packets aren't killing off the rhinos. That small heap of spent lipstick-smeared Benson & Hedges lapping against the kerbside isn't threatening the survival of all life on earth.

What's really at stake? The thing that really distinguishes litter is that, unlike carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, litter is visible. It looks grubby; it offends the senses; it makes it harder to pretend that everything is fine, that the planet isn't slowly overcooking in its own juices, that we aren't being ruled by a gang of malevolent chipmunks. In the world of the itinerant latex-gloved sprucer, what really matters is the look of the thing: the world must appear to be pleasant, even if it's a lie. This attitude isn't misguided community spirit. It's massive, untreated neuroticism.

Obsessive cleanliness has always stood for madness, but some of Sigmund Freud's insights might be useful here. In Civilisation and its Discontents, he considers the idea that the ideal of order and harmony in civilised society might just be a version of the neurotic tic of endlessly returning to the trauma. "Squalor of any kind seems to us to be incompatible with civilisation […] Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat, which, once a pattern is established, determines when, where and how something is to be done." Mess is anarchic and different, while cleanliness is rigid and always the same; in other words, the wisdom and sanity of society are in fact founded on an original madness. Most memorable is Freud's characterisation of the object of the neurotic's desire as an "immaculate anus". Arseholes will always be a bit mucky, but the neurotic is the person who scrubs theirs bloody in the hope of expunging any possible trace of dirt. Of course, for Freud anal eroticism also re-emerges as an attitude towards money: the anal-retentive is a miser, scrimping and saving, fiercely opposed to the reckless creativity of the anal-expulsive. No wonder the Tories are so keen on cleaning for the Queen. Their whole austere fiscal policy (not to mention their defunding of the arts) is just the horror of dirt, expressed through economics.

Litter tends to do that: the bits of crap we throw away often end up being the quickest route to understanding the totality of our society. Fast food boxes tell us how we eat; browning mattresses tell us how we sleep; condoms and needles tell us how we cope. It can even give us a window into geopolitics. The litter problem, especially in London, is partially down to the fact that there just aren't enough bins - and this is because we're worried, not without reason, that people might try to put bombs in them. (I'm told that when the Queen visited Dublin in 2011, the city removed many of its bins, and some of them still haven't been put back.) The flotsam on our streets, then, is just another unintended by-product of Britain's aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East. This is why we need to keep the litter around. It might not be pretty, but it'll never lie to us.

@sam_kriss

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