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.

I spoke to my favourite worker in my local supermarket, a cheerful and witty older gentleman I see most mornings, about the rise in shoplifting. He wears a body camera but is not allowed to caution any of the thieves who steal from his shop every day (anything from six to ten incidents, more at weekends). One regular is so brazen that he shouts ‘Same time tomorrow!’ as he leaves. I asked the worker if he thought replacing checkout workers with self-service machines had had anything to do with the rise in thieving and he answered immediately: ‘No – it was lockdown.’ I’d been thinking this too, but I’ve become such a loather of lockdown in retrospect – though I obeyed the rules at the time except the masking nonsense – that I couldn’t trust myself. I was pleased that someone with frontline experience of this post-pandemic social de-gradation felt the same as me, but also cross, because it could have been avoided if the government had had some guts. ‘People forgot how to interact decently with people and they’ve never relearned,’ he said.

Just as lockdown affected the mental health of schoolchildren by making them more anxious, it appears to have aggravated the aggressive tendencies of the antisocial. Shop workers are expected just to grin and bear it, even if there’s some maniac screaming in their face about the price of butter. This year there have been 200 assaults on Tesco staff every month – up a third on last year. The British Retail Consortium says that incidents of violence against retail workers have almost doubled since 2020, and the most recent Association of Convenience Stores crime report claimed that 89 per cent of staff have experienced abuse – everything from being shouted at to the punctured lung and broken ribs suffered by a shop worker who was attacked by three shoplifters over a £10 bottle of spirits.

We only need to look to America to see what happens to shops if this state of affairs is allowed to continue. In San Francisco, where the theft of anything less than $950 has been reclassified as a misdemeanour rather than a felony, and laws punish shop workers who try to detain thieves, parts of the city have become a ghost town. Nearly half of the shops in the city’s downtown Westfield mall have closed. Walgreens alone has shut 17 branches across San Francisco, blaming out-of-control shoplifting.

The death of Britain’s high-street shops, along with pubs and churches, is part of the relentless atomisation of society that was turbo-charged by lockdown, making lonely people lonelier, lazy people lazier and crazy people crazier. If the idle and parasitic can carry on attacking the industrious and productive without fear of punishment, we will turn from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters.