It's the small things that take you by surprise on returning to Britain after a long break, as I did over Christmas. Not the weather or the headlines or Labour's plunging fortunes, but things like the speed of cars, the cost of a train ticket, the convenience of cash machines (do we know how much they encourage profligacy?), and the number of newspapers on offer.

For me it was the smallest thing of all that gave me the greatest shock. It was the toilets at Gatwick. I was tipped, mid-morning, off a plane from Houston after 24 hours' travelling from Central America: three flights, three countries, endless hours of waiting around and a lot of toilet visits. We traipsed, blearily, through what appeared to be a temporary construction and down those long, long walks in which certain far-flung corners of Gatwick seem to specialise.

And into the loos. Or at least, into a queue outside the loos. A line of American visitors spilt out into the corridor. It quickly became apparent why. One of the three cubicles had been locked shut, presumably blocked. Another I was told not even to show my daughter into in case it frightened her. I glanced, saw blood, retreated. The sole final cubicle, for which everyone was queueing, wouldn't flush without a repeated pumping of the button and most people were coming out embarrassed and apologetic that they had not managed it.

Thence to wash their hands in a row of basins spattered with dried-on, encrusted vomit. It was extraordinarily embarrassing. I found myself apologising to these American visitors, saying that Britain wasn't usually like this — and the words dried up in my throat. Because it so often is. Somewhere, some time, the soul of the United Kingdom lost its pride in itself. Public spaces are dirty, people from ticket salesmen to immigration officials are rude, life operates on some invisible financial level that entirely passes by the needs and desires of ordinary people.

And so it was that I read Gordon Brown's new year messages with a sinking heart. One was all about riding out global economic forces, lots of long-term legislation and social reform, great challenges and firm convictions; the other, a sort of paean of praise to the Government dressed up as congratulations to NHS staff, with a pledge to give patients greater control over their healthcare and a proposal for a new constitution for the health service.

There was quite a lot about cleaning up hospitals in it as well. Mr Brown knows that, just as those American visitors' view of the UK will be for ever coloured by their first experience of it, the Gatwick toilets, most people's experience of hospital care ends at A&E and can be fixed for ever by the state of the toilets they find there. And they are quite right, too: public services experts will tell you that you can tell the state of a hospital by looking at the state of the loos in A&E, just as you can tell a good school by standing in the main corridor for five minutes.

Or, I suppose, the state of a country by the state of its airport toilets. Go to Houston, Texas; you could eat off those loo seats. Go, even, to Belize. You wouldn't want to eat off them, and you might pay 25c for a bit of loo roll, but then you can at least use them, and flush too, and someone will even wipe the sink after you.

I have no doubt at all that the loos at Gatwick are attended to (or not) by badly paid foreign workers who couldn't give a damn what an American tourist might think of the UK on first arrival. I know that the airport itself is run by a Spanish company that probably couldn't give a damn etc. I expect the cleaning of the loos is contracted out to some ghastly low-paying employment agency. And I have no doubt that if I was in charge of cleaning them, even as a British citizen (is this what Mr Brown meant when he said British jobs should be held for British workers?), I would find it hard to take much pride in my work.

But find the reason why the public loos in North and Central America work — a 25 cent financial incentive for someone, or a decent contract, or simply some pride — and why those in Britain are often squalid, and you will find the reason for the dissatisfaction that British people feel in public services and the State today. The complicated mix of public and private, foreign and domestic ownership of so many things that we still consider public services, the jumble of foreign workers, the temporary contracts and the corner-cutting in the drive for productivity, productivity, productivity: these have so muddled the lines of responsibility and removed the traditional British pride and courtesy that no one seems to care who should clean a loo at Gatwick any more.

That, and not the fear of global economic forces or concern about carbon emissions in China, is what accounts for the sense of cynicism and powerlessness about government in Britain today; yes, whether it is really government's responsibility or not. (You can see it, too, in the disrespect for poorer rail users, people without private transport, implicit in Network Rail's last-minute decision to disrupt train services on New Year's Eve, just as it does every Sunday for ordinary families trying to enjoy a weekend out.)

I see that a think-tank is proposing the anniversary of the creation of the NHS for a “British Day”, which the Prime Minister has long hankered after to remind us of our common values; I would go for a Thomas Crapper or an Alexander Cummings Day (Cummings was the real British inventor of the flush toilet), and have us all out cleaning public loos. I volunteer for Gatwick. I should think it's particularly revolting after the new year: anyone with me?

Alice Miles won the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year award last month

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