WHY can’t we just ban carrier bags? I love carrier bags and always take lots, while people in the queue tuttut disapprovingly.

Unlike the mountains of pointless packaging supermarkets use – shrink-wrapped swede for goodness sake – my carrier bags all get reused for lining bins, wrapping rubbish, packing parcels. But I can see there’s a problem. Carrier bags take zillions of years to rot away and cause all sorts of damage in the meantime.

So something has to be done.

And the Government’s got itself into a knot over what that might be.

Since Wales introduced a 5p charge for bags three years ago, the number of bags dished out by supermarkets fell by 76 per cent.

In England at the same, time, it rose by four per cent. But the Government still dithers and the mountain of bags soars by 7.1 billion a year.

So why not just ban them?

Simply say: “No more supermarket carrier bags. End of.” Easy.

After all, we existed without plastic bags until about 30 years ago. It was the supermarkets who forced them on us. Until then, we took our own bags, or rifled through the heaps of boxes always stacked up for us to help ourselves.

(Whatever happened to them?) Or, if we were really desperate, we paid for a paper bag with string handles that cut off the blood supply to our fingers and reminded us, far more effectively than a 5p tax, to bring our own bags next time.

Ban the bags. Simple, cheap, effective.

So, of course, it stands absolutely no chance of happening.