Big Brother Is Watching You…In St Andrews

Who knew that Fife Council was so steeped in Orwellian literary culture? You might think Animal Farm is the council’s set text, but no, it is the darker, more morally twisted 1984 that is evidently their bible. 

An article published in The Saint on 1 October reported that Fife Council has been granted £22,500 by the Chewing Gum Task Force, a government-backed organisation, to rid the streets in our town of the sticky stuff. The Chewing Gum Task Force, sounding like a sub-section of the Special Air Service for twelve-year-olds, has obviously stuck its oar into other councils too, with “gum littering reductions of up to 86% in funded areas.” 

Now don’t get me wrong, this is no bad thing on the face of it. I hate gum-spattered streets as much as the next man. Yet Big Brother seeps into the streets of St Andrews in a much more subtle way than gum, and gum is pretty diminutive. No, the sign of Orwell comes from the signs themselves. 

Have you noticed them? They are attached to almost every pole, lamppost or vertical metal thing in St Andrews. The prolific sign, which Fife Council has tied to the town in tandem with the Chewing Gum Task Force, reads, “In St Andrews, we bin our gum.” 

The sign might seem unremarkable, but, as ever, the devil is in the details. If we look at the grammatical construction of it, the situation deepens like a coastal shelf. 

First things first, the use of the prepositional phrase “In St Andrews” connotes that, in other places, people don’t bother binning their gum. So what is Fife Council trying to say about the likes of Dundee, Glenrothes, and Kirkcaldy, eh? Absolute snobbery, if you ask me. 

The operative word is the first-person plural “we.” And I see exactly what they have done here. Fife Council has been so crass as to multiply Orwell’s original number so now we have a band of Big Brothers, as though it couldn’t get any worse! But Airstrip One aside, who is this “we”? Most likely the locals. So then at whom is the sign directed? The tourists and the students, of course: yes, the blight of this sacred town since 1413. If the punitive plaque wasn’t directed at us, then why did they appear at the start of semester as we all filed back into town? 

Don’t get me wrong, a sign I can handle — generally. My real bugbear is what the sign intimates. It’s prickly, hostile, and authoritative. Some people will cry out, “That’s what the sign’s meant for!” What about a simple please, though? Fife Council was obviously never taught their p’s and q’s. 

Perhaps the town of St Andrews is trying to get more personal with us. Maybe it’s just trying to give us a few fun facts about itself, like a Hinge profile. We have established it doesn’t like gum. But why stop with the signs? How about Fife Council gives us some more helpful insights into St Andrews’ character? For example, “In St Andrews, all our pubs are being undercut by the new Wetherspoons,” or “In St Andrews, we have a major housing crisis,” or maybe even “In St Andrews, we use international students to help fund the University.” 

The de-gumming of St Andrews is a noble pursuit, but the signs are abrasive. The late, great David Hockney championed the “End Bossiness Soon” movement. Perhaps Fife Council could take a leaf out of that artist’s book, instead of Orwell’s.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons