How to clean up our city

The crime dares not speak its name. Trivial, unimportant and petty bourgeois, "littering a public place" seems beneath the dignity of modern politics, let alone the police. Rulers pass by in their chariots. When they descend, they expect some Walter Raleigh to throw a cloak over offending dog shit. Please, let us worry about something more elevating.

Yet survey after survey reveals litter and graffiti as Londoners' number-one concern. It offends both their dignity and their security.

Fouling public places is illegal. It is the most obvious sign of a collapse of communal order. As I draw into London on a train, the graffiti coating the cuttings and tunnels announces that this city is not under control.

The McDonald's tubs that litter Oxford Street declare the triumph of global capitalism over civic pride. Mastiffs pooing in the park might as well bark that decent citizens are not welcome there.

In zero-tolerance New York, graffiti is cleaned from public transport instantly. No bus or carriage is allowed out of its shed unless clean. A scrawled Tube says to the passenger that it is an unpoliced Tube.

This has nothing to do with "tagging" art, for which councils can make space available if they like. Nothing induces fear of public spaces so much as graffiti. It is the signature of anarchy.

When Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris he rightly discerned that public cleanliness was the route to power. If, like Hercules, he could clean the city's Augean stables, like Hercules he could ascend the throne. He did. He sent gangs of turquoise-clad officials - proclaiming the mayor's patronage - into the streets to scrub every wall and pavement, day and night. It worked. He became president.

London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, is trying the same game, but only up to a point. Litter in London is, rightly, the responsibility of local boroughs, some performing better than others. The Soho boundary between Westminster and Camden is a poor comment on the latter. I am amazed that London boroughs can finance the world's most draconian parking controls yet are impotent in the face of mountains of rubbish. Perhaps we should dump garbage on cars and paint-spray their sides with graffiti to get the authorities to take notice.

In 1986, Livingstone's nemesis, Margaret Thatcher, returned from a visit to "sparkling" Jerusalem and harangued her ministers about the contrast with " litterstrewn" Britain. Showing that Tony Blair did not invent gimmick gover nment, she promptly appointed Richard Branson to be her "litter czar". The publicity-crazed Branson unwisely agreed.

They duly poked sticks into pieces of paper laid out for photographers in St James's Park - the park having unfortunately been rendered spotless for their visit. The idea was to press the unemployed into cleaning up Britain, under banners such as Litter Aid and the National Environment Works Scheme (News).

Three years later this ludicrously centralised scheme collapsed, having spent more than £3 million on offices and publicity. When asked what had been achieved an official described himself as "in a nocomment situation on this one". So much for public audit.

Livingstone accepts that public squalor is a local responsibility. His problem is that he has too many "locals" to dragoon into action. As the Standard reported last week, around £8 million is being spent on graffiti alone by London Underground, the bus companies, the Transport Police and the boroughs. Yet graffiti is said to be twice as bad today as six years ago. (Perhaps those with the time to measure it could remove it instead.) But the Mayor is not imitating Chirac. He is a true son-of-Blair. He has invented a "four-year programme" with a meaningless title, The Capital Standard. It will spend more than £1 million not only on cleaning but on an " education and information campaign", a "new inspectorate" and "more training for local authority officers". In other words, money is to be spent on salaried bureaucrats. Meanwhile the Association of London Government is said to be seeking "more powers" from government to combat rubbish dumping and graffiti. It has power already. It just does not use it.

I cannot imagine a problem more simple of solution than public dirt. Those who police London's streets, which means traffic wardens, should also control the dumping of rubbish and graffiti. These are surely as "offensive" to the public as parked cars. The average London parking meter is now as likely to be used to prop up an incontinent dog or a stack of household rubbish as it is to stand sentinel over a motor car. We pay wardens to police roads. Let them police pavements as well.

But the claim on every penny of Livingstone's £1 million should be for Paris-style gangs on permanent patrol, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. They should respond to a graffiti hotline. The job is not for meetings or committees. It is for vans and brushes. Graffiti clearing would make an ideal magistrates' community service order. It would be a good project for local schools. It cannot be that expensive.

The public is entitled to have the dignity of its open spaces respected. That dignity shows a community with self-control, able to present itself with pride. Authorities refusing to respect that pride are declaring their surrender to lawlessness.

So no more nonsense committees. Get out there and scrub. If I can do it when my gatepost is daubed, so surely can the Mayor.

Where is he, anyway?