The Eric Pickles dilemma: clean streets or angry voters

Tory chairman Eric Pickles wants refuse collections to be more frequent even as councils cut welfare. It's uncomfortable to think that many cash-strapped taxpayers will agree
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A homeless man in Liverpool in 2009. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

It seemed such a middling midweek thing but it has the potential to inflame, to tsunami. It was a Big Question. It asked, of the payers of council tax, just what they wanted: a clean street, or the nebulous knowledge that someone old and a bit mad and possibly drunk is being taken care of?

It was Eric Pickles who asked it. The magnificently ebullient Eric Pickles, Tory chairman arguing with the entire nation's local councils, over priorities: saying, essentially, that litter collection was as important as any other council function. This came in the week that Liverpool council announced it needed to cut 1,500 jobs on account of cuts.

Do people want to pay for remote social services or direct bag-collecting? Here are Eric's words: "If we don't sort it out, the cause of localism will be set back by a generation by creating an army of residents who view their council with resentment rather than respect. There is genuine anger that over the last decade council taxes have doubled and bin collections have halved."

Here are other words, from the author Bill Bryson, writing about Liverpool in Notes From a Small Island: "I took a train to Liverpool. They were having a festival of litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy lives to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape."

Technically, Pickles was dealing with a question about litter, but it has uprooted nests of vipers. What do we actually pay for in our council taxes, angrily asked for, with payments and penalties? Do we pay for something we can see – cleaner streets, fewer visible rats, less jumble outside jumbly houses? Or something we can't see (the inside of a care home) or never visit (the inside of a local library, denuded of books by 30 years of book-haters – or not even "haters", but those that think books are simply a bit… meh)?

As often, Mr Pickles has found the hinge of a debate, and managed to redefine the left-right argument we have been missing for so long. Will councils, with their dwindling money-stock, prioritise trash-collection over their more nebulous aims – trying to keep the poor warm, the homeless less fouled, the uneducated educated, the bitter and the barren counselled? Or will they simply use our council money to pick up bags, from our otherwise roughly clean streets, at the right time and on the right day?

It seems a trivial topic, but it goes to the core. Almost everyone, excluding the cast of The Archers, walks past a homeless person every day. Almost everyone gets more annoyed by the unemptied bins slumped on the corner than by the unedifying people slumped on the corner, unnoticed after the first glance. Council taxes hurt us, and we all hate nasty streets, and we're all broke, and in the end it's going to come down to selfishness.

Most people want to see some bang for their buck: a clean boulevard, an empty doorway, a lack of cabbagey. And they'll happily pay for it. Most people don't care about the dispossessed, the hurt; and even if they do, they don't necessarily want to pay a local council – or fail to pay a local council and a year later face angry bailiffs – to sort it out. Mr Pickles has defined an argument, and set out his stall, and thus there could be no finer chairman of the Conservative party.

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