Britain is now a nation of shoplifters

I was a teenage shoplifter. I had a good run at it, from 12 to 14, and found it as addictive as any drug: the anticipation, the antsiness, the sharp stab of joy on completion. But all it took was getting caught, spending an hour in a police cell before being grimly collected and yelled at by my dad, to make sure I never went looking for a five-finger discount again.

Shoplifting used to be something which, with the help of stern parents and the police, people grew out of. No longer. Now we are in a world of, as the Gail’s Bakery boss Luke Johnson has put it, ‘widespread, really widespread aggression, abuse and shoplifting’. Asda chairman Stuart Rose says that shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised due to lack of police action. In the past year, retail theft rose by 19 per cent across the country – 27 per cent across ten of the UK’s largest cities.

Poor neighbourhoods have had to put up with the smash-and-grab antics of what we might reasonably call ‘feral youth’ for a long time, but this malign craze has spread to leafy London villages. Even in my own ’hood, sedate Hove, we get a lot of shoplifters. I’m on the lookout for them at my volunteer job in a charity shop. These ones are surely the lowest of the low – the retail equivalent of stealing from a poor box. Company policy is not to challenge them; this has an inevitable weakening of morale, to the extent that whereas we once kept a manager for years, now we keep them for mere months.