My last gig in broadcasting was at LBC radio. It was an unlikely fit. Nick Ferrari aside, the station isn’t known for its adherence to right-wing orthodoxies. But working - briefly - for a media outfit with a left-leaning audience was an eye-opener.
In particular, I was struck by the moral contortions many of those listeners who phoned or texted into my program were willing to execute. None more so than when it came to the question of shoplifting.
I think retail theft is a bellwether crime. And it’s on the rise. This week it was reported that one in four Britons have personally seen someone in the act of stealing from a shop. This news may not convulse the nation as a major murder might. But its growing prevalence is a national scandal.
As I said on X on Thursday: “Stealing has become normalised, without shame or sanction, in many parts of the country. This marks another milestone in the UK’s slow march to anarchy.”
And yet, if my LBC listeners were anything to go by, shoplifting is no big deal. Many felt it to be a victimless crime, with big supermarkets easily able to write-off the losses. Several of those who phoned-in did so to claim that shoplifting was an act of economic necessity, wealth redistribution and even ‘social justice’. For them, the typical shoplifter was a struggling single mum forced by cruel welfare cuts to steal nappies and baby formula.
Such an ‘analysis’ exemplifies how far many on the Left are not only divorced from reality, but prepared to throw some of our poorest people under the bus for the sake of ideology.
Shoplifting symbolises Britain's moral collapse - and the Left's defence of it is no accident, writes Colin Brazier
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For one thing, many of the victims of shoplifting aren’t faceless corporations like Tesco. They are small family businesses, for whom stolen stock might be the difference between profit and loss (and closure).
I remember one extraordinary moment at LBC which bore this out. A caller rang in claiming to have been what he described as a ‘professional shoplifter’. While he told his story, my producer took a call from a Mr Patel, whose corner shop had been driven to the point of closure by shoplifters. Mr Patel patiently explained to the shoplifter on the other line how he routinely worked 14-hour days, while regularly facing physical assault if he tried to stop thieves (whose actions rarely resulted in police intervention).
Here was the reality of shoplifting. Not a Dickensian heroine, stealing to feed and clothe her child. But a man who stole to order, and did so prolifically and profitably enough to make a real job unnecessary. And another, the small businessman, whose life was made a misery by our tolerance of this most under-rated of crimes.
Of course, there were listeners who phoned in who were as horrified as I was about this toxic trend and, unlike me, had been at its sharp end. Store managers who pointed out that some chains were closing outlets in the most blighted urban areas, creating ‘shopping deserts’ where the old and vulnerable could no longer buy milk and bread.
I heard from store detectives who said the police wouldn’t respond to any crime that involved stolen goods of less than £200 in value. Of organised crime gangs clearing shelves of meat and toiletries. Of drug users walking out of shops with fully-loaded shopping trolleys they hadn’t paid for.
My recurrent question was: how many of these thieves ‘need’ to steal? In other words, how much credence should we attach to the radical Left-wing view that shoplifting is mainly an act of exigence? Opinions varied. But not by much. When people who actually worked in supermarkets or shops called in, there was broad agreement that the proportion of those who nicked to survive was never higher than ten per cent.
I would guess that the people phoning in to ‘excuse’ shoplifting were rarely the ones to live with its consequences. As with so much of so-called progressive politics, middle class activists do not suffer from the disappearance of the world they seek to dismantle. This has been the way since the 1960s. The Left has consistently sought to undermine institutions which, though now unfashionable, actually offered protection to our poorest.
From our 21st century standpoint, it’s almost impossible to imagine how deeply ingrained was the Judeo-Christian idea of the Mosaic Law (better known as the Ten Commandments), of which “thou shalt not steal” is but one. For more than a millennium everyone accepted that theft was a grave sin, punishable by damnation.
Not so anymore. The Bible story has been supplanted by a version of Robin Hood that sees taking someone else’s stuff as a necessary evil; just another anonymous economic transaction. But this is a luxury belief, easy to subscribe to if it’s not your corner shop being turned over, nor your child wrestling with a thief at the check-out.
None of this is an accident. Marxists believe all property is theft. By encouraging a belief that nobody really owns anything, they invite the conclusion that anything belongs to everyone. Those who think shoplifting is trivial and without a far deeper corrosive effect on society haven’t been paying attention. Its normalisation is a significant step towards an ungovernable future.
