“Litter,” wrote Henry Mance in a recent issue of the FT Weekend Magazine, “is the landscape of a failed state.”

And the evidence is all around. Discarded drink cans, sandwich wrappers, fast food containers and empty fag packets combine to make up the detritus on our roads. Canine excrement, cigarette butts, sweet wrappers and the like lie scattered on our streets.

Yet, when challenged, many of the perpetrators would deny they were supporters of squalor. Certainly, few would be happy to find their homes in a similar state.

There is a widespread lack of pride in place, and as a nation, we no longer seem to care.

At the same time, we have become increasingly aware in recent months of the many hundreds of illegal waste dumps that currently despoil our countryside, some containing tens of thousands of tonnes of rubbish, and often allowed to operate for months and even years on end, seemingly with impunity.

Fly tipping is also commonplace, with those responsible seldom punished, regularly leaving land-owners to bear the not inconsiderable costs of cleaning up.

Making matters worse, an underfunded Environment Agency appears ever more impotent.

On our high streets, charity shops are sometimes the first sign of impending decline, to be followed all too often by an invasion of nail bars, Turkish barbers, vape shops, bookies and fast food outlets, which, like a cancer left untreated, can eventually kill their host.

Sadly, rubbish and rubbish retailers are not the only evidence of our failed state. To their number can be added the likes of shoplifters, fare dodgers and those able to work but who instead prefer to live on benefits. Like those who litter, expecting others to clean up after them, they require the rest of us to pay for them, whether through our taxes, our fares or through the price of the products we buy.

And where once such behaviour would have been widely condemned and considered socially unacceptable by the vast majority, it is now so commonplace as to be nothing out of the ordinary.

Thankfully, the situation here in the South Hams is nowhere near as bad as it is in some other parts of the country. There is still some life left in our high streets. And we have yet to be submerged beneath a sea of litter. But the signs are there.

Nor have matters been helped by politicians of all persuasions. The Environment Agency continues to be defunded while business rates, national insurance, the minimum wage and town centre car parking charges have all inexorably increased.

Yet our current government thinks it has the answer. Launching their ‘Pride In Place’ programme, Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared: “We must reverse the devastating decline in our communities and give power, agency and control to the very people who want to improve their community – those who have skin in the game.”

His colleague Communities Secretary Steve Reed added: “Pride in Place is about giving power to local people who know best what needs to change in their area.”

This, of course, is the government that, through its local government reorganisation programme, is centralising power and removing decision-making still further away from local people – a reminder yet again it’s not what politicians say but what they do that matters.

With the result that the rubbish will almost certainly remain.