British travellers are unrivalled when it comes to selfishness – we need a lesson from the Japanese

As a frequent flier, often using more than 30 airlines a year – each with different policies on everything from bottled water to when you can use your mobile phone – I’m amazed it’s taken this long for a discussion about peanuts on planes to hit the headlines.

The singer Dua Lipa publically lambasted United Airlines last week for continuing to serve the snack on one of their flights, tweeting: “I can’t believe I’m on a @united flight rn and I told the steward that my sister was severely allergic to nuts and his reply was ‘we’re not a nut-free airline so if she has an EpiPen she might have to use that as we can’t not serve other passengers in your section nuts’.”

Personally, I’m yet to fully decide where I stand on the issue of peanuts on planes, specifically. On one hand I’d hate for a fellow passenger to suffer a severe bought of anaphylaxis (or worse) for the sake of a few salty titbits, when other snacks could easily do the job. But on the other, part of me does question why 300 or more other people should have their flight disrupted by one single individual.

On several journeys in the past year I’ve heard more than a fair share of murmuring discontent at the decision of some airlines to deprive other passengers of these potentially deadly nibbles. On boarding a plane, train or bus, do we suddenly lose our grasp of sympathy?

Can you ask for an extra plane meal after you've finished your first one?

I think for many, it’s not the denying of peanuts per se, but the principle it represents. And nuts or no nuts, this spat between an American airline and a 22-year-old pop star exposes a much deeper problem; our growing inability to share public transport in a fashion that’s fair, compassionate and dignified, without all falling out.

My coming and going, to and from this country, on a monthly, or sometimes weekly basis, has helped me identify a culture that appears to be innately British and North American – a “screw you” traveller philosophy, fuelled by our increasingly blinkered narcissism. These are just the legumes that broke the camel’s back. We live in an era of unrivalled traveller self-centredness.

Am I the only person, for example, that thinks it’s unacceptable to file your fingernails on the tube? Spraying minute fragments of yourself (and whatever happens to be under your nails) all over a shared, public space. Worse still, how about having to endure a bus ride while being subjected to someone else’s music, blared through the tinny speakers of a smartphone? Or, during the recent sweltering heatwave, to sit topless on trains and coaches? OK, we get it, it’s hot. But this is Bayswater, not Bondi.

I’m not intending to sound prudish or come across as an easily offended snob, but we seem to have lost an appreciation for the “public” nature of public transport. Few of us are rich enough to bounce around the world in our very own private jets or chauffeur-driven limousines, therefore we need to fall in line with some collective idea of what is good and bad behaviour.

Many of us had our hearts warmed by the Japanese football fans that stayed behind to clean the Mordovia Arena, following their triumph over Colombia at the World Cup. While this was, indeed, fun social media fodder, from my experience of Japanese trains this is entirely the norm and far from a cultural caricature.

Japanese transport is spotless, empty seats are filled by bums, not bags, and no one would ever dream of having a private mobile phone conversation surrounded by hundreds of strangers. On a recent 28-minute London Overground trip between Dalston and Peckham, however, I learnt more about the sex lives of East London’s teenagers from the blabbermouth sat in front of me than I could from a whole year of watching Eastenders.

Why is Japan so obsessed with punctuality?

In South America, meanwhile, many people rely upon coaches in order to travel huge distances around the bumpy continent and, on the whole, they’re treated like the business class cabins of long-haul airliners, respectfully maintained by their passengers. I have never once seen someone’s feet stray onto a seat, and while they can grow grubby over the course of an 18-hour journey, almost no one leaves without cleaning up after themselves.

In Britain, however, I suspect we may all have a deeply routed disregard for each other hardwired into our increasingly self-righteous Western psyche. Have you ever guiltily stretched out across several airport seats and thought to yourself: “it doesn’t matter, I’ll never see any of these people ever again.” Or maybe you’ve sat with your rucksack on the train seat beside you, ever so subtly warding off new passengers boarding at the next station? Perhaps you’ve scoffed down a hot, greasy meal on the tube? And justified it to yourself because you were “in a rush” - just another anonymous face in the melee.

Maybe this everyman for himself attitude is trickling down from the deeply divided, cut and run political landscape the country finds itself in right now? A culture that flings warm beer into the air in joyous celebration when we’re in the pink, but then rapidly slinks out of the side entrance when the party’s over and there are 100,000 plastic cups that need putting in the bin. This doesn’t have to be the way we operate.