SOMEHOW or other (but chiefly courtesy David Attenborough) plastic has reached the top of the political agenda.

Theresa May appears to give the need to curb our use of this hugely-damaging indestructible material equal priority alongside saving the NHS and successfully delivering us from what has become the mire of Brexit.

But both she and the sainted Attenborough are latecomers in concern over the enduring character of pollution.

In the forefront, I would submit, was the late Tom Stamp, of Whitby. A lovely man, Tom ran a hardware shop up on the West Cliff.

Buying a retractable tape measure there one day (I still use it) I discovered he was also a poet. For there on the counter was a small (4x6ins) volume of his verse, A Pocketful of Rhyme.

Published in 1975 by Caedmon Press, run by Tom and his wife Cordelia, it included a humorous gem from which I quoted here recently.

Believing a customer had asked “Do you stock anti-quacks?” Tom offered a few pleasantries on ducks, only to discover the customer wanted antique wax. But if that anticipated the Two Ronnies’ famous Four Candles sketch, what about this, from the collection’s final poem, Just A Thought?:

The city glare of noise and light
Shuts out the world of stars from sight,
And thoughtless men pollution spread
Which circulates when they are dead.

Of course the endlessly-circulating pollution is the plastic which all of us have been “thoughtlessly” using – and many discarding even more thoughtlessly – for decades.

And while we might salute Tom for highlighting the persistence of pollution close on half a century ago, he strikes a double blow with his early awareness of light pollution.

Tom, who died in 1991, produced another two or three small collections of verse. With its string of well-observed, wonderful images – “back-bent, wind-spent, folk brave the bridge…everywhere is the sound of the sea” – his poem Whitby in Winter is as fine a topographical poem as any I know.

And an outstanding volume, a true collector’s item, is Miss Raine’s Flowers, which beautifully marries handwritten flower poems by Tom with charming water colours by a former matron of Whitby Hospital.

Entitled Growing Things, its final poem opens:

Weed killers and moss poisons are liquid sin
Which I for one would never dabble in.

It goes on: “That is why I so delight/ When I see Nature win the fight.” And it concludes: “She goes her ageless silent way/ And doesn’t care what man may do or spray,/ For she subdued the dinosaur/ And who can say that man will count for more?”

Recently reviewing a major anthology of North-East poetry I regretted the omission of Tom Stamp. Having re-read more of his poems since then I feel even more keenly that here is a North-East poet who deserves to be much better known – and celebrated.

POLITICAL correctness is bad enough in…well, politics. Need it bedevil sport? The FA has announced that shortlists for future jobs will include at least one black and ethnic minority candidate.

What if all the potentially best candidates are such? Will one be dropped to make way for a white candidate?