Uncomfortable truth at the heart of Britain's shoplifting epidemic.
DANIEL HANNAN: The uncomfortable truth at the heart of Britain's shoplifting epidemic. It's time we woke up and admitted what has really caused this problem.
One measure of the moral seriousness of a country is its respect for property. Britain's activist coppers will finger your collar for posting the wrong words.
During lockdown, they were almost tyrannical in their petty persecution of people who were sitting in parks. Yet they seem uninterested in going after thieves or recovering stolen goods.
Retailers are struggling against an unprecedented surge in shoplifting. The number of reported incidents has doubled since lockdown. Security guards are popping up everywhere, and even basic food items such as cheese and chocolate are now increasingly sold in locked cases.
Independent shops which cannot afford guards are closing down. Even supermarket chains are reeling under the pressure, and some Sainsbury's security staff have been issued with stab vests.
It was reported at the weekend that a Waitrose employee of 17 years' standing had been sacked after confronting a flagrant thief who had filled a bag with chocolate Easter eggs. The employee had tried to wrestle back the bag and, as the criminal left, had thrown one of the eggs in the direction of some shopping trolleys in frustration.
If I had been the manager of that branch, I would have given the man a promotion. But, sadly, that is no longer the country we live in.
We seem to have become contemptuous of property rights, even as we have become obsessed with the rights of felons and malefactors.
Retailers are struggling against an unprecedented surge in shoplifting. Even basic food items such as cheese and chocolate are now increasingly sold in locked cases
In the 18th century, our legal system was rooted in the defence of ownership and the sanctity of contract. People guilty of what we now call shoplifting were flogged, pilloried and, not infrequently, transported to the colonies for years of penal labour.
Victorian reformers tempered some of these laws, not least because juries would refuse to convict when what they saw as a disproportionate sentence was likely to follow.
Still, Britain remained a country with strong property rights, a merchant nation rising to a pinnacle of wealth and power precisely because of its unique commitment to private ownership.
That commitment has dwindled as the state has expanded. As governments presume to tell us what hours we may work, on what terms we might let our property and what we may say in public, they become indifferent to theft.
Shopkeepers, like people who have had their phones or even their cars stolen, know there is little point in contacting the police after they have been raided.
Even when locator tags show where the offenders are, little attempt is made to confront them. Meanwhile the £200 shoplifting charter means theft under that threshold is a 'low-value offence' and allows criminals to avoid consequences.
Perhaps the cops are too busy poring over X accounts for evidence of transphobic comments. It seems everything is policed – except theft. Now we learn that the tiny handful of shoplifters who do end up behind bars – generally the most hardened repeat offenders, the professional crooks – need no longer fear even this sanction.
Under Labour's plan to replace prison sentences of less than 12 months with community-based alternatives, the tiny risk of incarceration for multiple offenders will be removed, which will almost certainly worsen the shoplifting epidemic.
Marks & Spencer's retail director, Thinus Keeve, says that shoplifting 'is becoming more brazen, more organised and more aggressive'
Hardly surprising then that, as the Marks & Spencer retail director, Thinus Keeve, puts it, shoplifting 'is becoming more brazen, more organised and more aggressive'.
In a culture in which the immorality of theft is downplayed, where stealing from businesses is somehow portrayed as not really stealing at all, we should not be surprised by the kind of mass organised looting we saw in south London last week and that has since spread to other cities, organised on social media.
Some of the hooligans involved even portray themselves as political activists.
A group calling itself Take Back Power promised months of organised looting, which it describes as 'taking back from the billionaire-owned corporations that are extracting wealth from ordinary hard-working people and funnelling it to the top 1 per cent'.
Seriously? Nicking stuff from Tesco or Aldi or M&S is hurting billionaires? Not the ordinary customers, who must pay higher prices to cover the £5billion-odd lost each year through shoplifting?
Not the employees who are abused every day by people who can't be bothered to pay for the things they want to take?
What caused the rise in stealing? Was it the lockdown, which severed social bonds, isolated young people and taught an entire generation contempt for the law (for the laws at that time were contemptible)?
Did spending their formative years hunched over screens, deprived of human contact, make a whole generation anti-social? Did the rise in truancy, sometimes now disguised as home-schooling, create a pool of young offenders?
Or was it the accompanying surge in immigration that followed from 2021 as a result of people's refusal to return to work? Did importing a population of strangers destroy the mutual trust which is the first and strongest defence against bad behaviour?
It is certainly true that, in the years when Britain was a by-word for orderliness, it was a homogeneous society.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, liked to recall that, when he was a student in this country, he watched in astonishment as people in Piccadilly Circus bought newspapers by leaving money in an unattended honesty box, taking the correct change as needed.
Such behaviour is now unthinkable in Piccadilly Circus. It might be found in Singapore, which has successfully inculcated in its huge immigrant population a sense of national cohesion. But Britain has become rancorous, divided and untrusting. We no longer resemble our old selves, having instead the feel of a Third World country, where litter, shoplifting and private security guards signal the absence of social capital.
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In a healthy country, shoplifting would not be dealt with by CCTV, uniformed guards or even police intervention. It would be dealt with by stigma, by the closing of ranks against the wrongdoers. If a 12-year-old who slips chocolates into her bag is made to feel intense shame, she is unlikely to make a second attempt, let alone to join an organised looting spree.
This, though, requires the rest of us to understand why shoplifting is indeed shameful. It requires us to teach young people that pocketing goodies is not stealing from 'corporates'.
Every item on the shelf represents the labour of the supplier and the hope and trust of the shopkeeper.
Plundering those items desecrates the space, spitting in the face of the people who make markets possible and dragging society into a faithless anomie.
Yes, punishment should play a part. If it really is true that we have no prison places left, then perhaps we could be imaginative.
Perhaps shoplifters might be sentenced to stand for a certain period in a busy shopping street with a placard around their necks reading 'shoplifter'.
That, though, is only part of the solution. Our laws emanate from our social attitudes. Yes, we should toughen the protection of property and the sanctions deployed against violators. But it is up to all of us to show zero tolerance for crimes which, to those on the receiving end of them, feel anything but petty.
We should treat shops as temples of mutual trust, and we should recognise the heroism of those who are up before dawn day after day to open them up, suffering all manner of tithes and taxes, regulations and abuses.
When Napoleon Bonaparte called us a nation of shopkeepers, he was accurately describing us at the zenith of our power. How low we have sunk since then.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is President of the Institute for Free Trade. DM.
