It\u2019s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he\u2019d been sacked just for doing his job \u2013 for stopping a thief nicking booze \u2013 and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, the supermarket says, because it has a \u2018deter, don\u2019t detain\u2019 policy \u2013 though what it thinks could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is\u00a0anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n
But the feeling for Sean isn\u2019t just a swell of support for one man; it\u2019s also a symptom of wider frustration. Shoplifting across the nation is at the highest level since records began two decades ago. Do nothing, we\u2019re told, leave it to the police \u2013 but they also do nothing. And this is really why Sean\u2019s story has hit a national nerve. British people have watched the norms we grew up with unravel in just a generation \u2013 the old taboos lift like mist, against stealing, littering, yelling abuse. In February this year, half of all people polled admitted to dropping litter on the street. Yet we\u2019re told, like Sean, not to act, to leave well enough alone.<\/p>\n
There are more violent crimes than shoplifting, but because we all shop and because we see it around us, it\u2019s especially corrosive. Shoplifters are committing a record number of repeat offences, the Centre for Social Justice has revealed: an average of nine offences per shoplifter. These people are escorted out nicely \u2013 \u2018deterred\u2019 \u2013 then in they come again, entirely shameless. And because the consequences are so negligible, all manner of different groups have got in on the game.<\/p>\n
British people have watched the norms we grew up with unravel in just a generation<\/p>\n
There are the petty crooks and addicts, like the Morrisons man. Keep an eye out and you\u2019ll see them filling their rucksacks. Security sees them too but no longer makes much of a move to stop them. They also target middle-class stores like Marks & Spencer, whose retail director explained recently the daily battle faced by staff: \u2018In the past week alone we have had gangs forcing open locked cabinets and stripping shelves, two men brazenly emptying the shelves of steak and walking out, a large group of young people ransacking a store before assaulting a security guard, a colleague headbutted trying to defuse a situation and another hospitalised after having ammonia thrown in their face.\u2019<\/p>\n
On a different part of the high street, there are the steal-to-order gangs, after trainers, electronic and designer goods. My ten-year-old was in the opticians recently when a man burst in, smashed the glass case beside his face and scooped the designer frames into his bag. The optician\u2019s assistant didn\u2019t flinch. \u2018It happens twice a week,\u2019 she said, \u2018especially when there\u2019s only one of us here. They\u2019re always watching.\u2019<\/p>\n
Since the free-for-all days of Black Lives Matter, no protest in a British city is complete without a little looting. It\u2019s thought of as a sort of going-home present, a thank-you for attending. Protests over Gaza now often include a spate of thievery, though should protestors ever find themselves governed by Hamas, they might soon not have hands to shoplift with.<\/p>\n
The old shoplifting debate used to be about need. Was it wrong to steal food for a\u00a0starving child? But food, as a proportion of income, is now far cheaper than it used to be and a sizeable part of the shoplifting epidemic in both Britain and America is just for middle-class kicks. Some 15 years ago I wrote about what seemed to be an emerging trend for professionals pilfering, and about a friend of mine who regularly stole from Waitrose for reasons even he didn\u2019t quite understand. Now there are TikTok accounts where young Brits challenge themselves to steal the most in a single visit.<\/p>\n
The New Yorker\u2019s star columnist Jia Tolentino said this week, in conversation with the internet personality Hasan Piker, that she felt just fine about shoplifting \u2013 or \u2018micro-looting\u2019 as she put it \u2013 from evil supermarket chains. For Piker and Tolentino, and for a considerable proportion of their fans both here and in America, shoplifting is now not only OK but admirable, a form of activism, a pushback against capitalism.<\/p>\n
Online, the reaction of Gen Z to Sean Egan\u2019s efforts to stop a thief was more often disgust than respect. \u2018Oh, no!\u2019 (This is a real comment.) \u2018Someone is stealing petty merchandise from a multi-million-pound chain that pays me just slightly over minimum wage! I must stop them!\u2019<\/p>\n
The same twenty- and thirtysomethings, who without turning a hair pay \u00a34 for an oat matcha latte, justify helping themselves on the grounds that they\u2019re Robin Hood figures taking from the oppressor and giving to the oppressed \u2013 which is themselves, of course, because that\u2019s how they identify. Tolentino would never steal from independent shops, she says, though she must know that it\u2019s those evil low-cost supermarkets where the real poor shop and where prices rise as a\u00a0result of all the thievery.<\/p>\n
The steady drip-drip of shameless rule-breaking acts like acid on society \u2013 on our sense of a shared and fair public space. But spare a thought for the supermarkets too, which are themselves in a bind. The police have long since given up on shoplifting, since it costs far more to properly police a\u00a0supermarket than they\u2019d ever save by stopping stealing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same dilemma faced by Transport for London or any company running transport in the UK. Twenty years ago, fare dodging was relatively rare. Remember the outrage over dodgers on London\u2019s short-lived bendy buses? Free buses they were called. These days, all manner of Tubes and trains are considered \u2018free\u2019. Regular commuters have become used to the sight of quite ordinary people hopping barriers or pushing through saloon-style gates behind paying customers. The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) is known as the \u2018Free LR\u2019.<\/p>\n
So why not more CCTV? Why fewer inspectors than in the days when there was less crime? The answer is that it costs far more to employ the inspectors than would ever be recovered in penalties. TfL already spends more than \u00a320 million enforcing fare payment but recovers just over \u00a31 million. It\u2019s not worth it. Like the supermarkets, it can\u2019t afford not to let people get away with it.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s where the dilemma becomes a sort of paradox. The more freeloaders there are, the closer everyone else comes to doing the same. We\u2019re like those 2p pieces in a classic coin-pusher arcade game: all of us just holding together on the top shelf \u2013 more likely to topple with every new round.<\/p>\n
This year, London and the UK have been the subject of angry debate between liberal optimists and the prophets of societal collapse. Is it hellish here (Yookay) or still civilised, the envy of the world? The truth lies somewhere between the two. London hasn\u2019t fallen \u2013 but it feels very much as if it\u2019s hanging in the balance. True, violent crime and homicide are down, but a new sort of low-level violence seems to be rising \u2013 violence for the sake of it, Clockwork Orange-style.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, on Stamford Hill, a group of boys of about 15 were idly hurling stones at cars and passing cyclists. They wouldn\u2019t appear in any stats. No one even paused to tell them not to. Who\u2019d dare? Twice I\u2019ve nearly come a cropper as the same kids yell at me as I bike by or they jump into the road in the hope that I\u2019ll fall.<\/p>\n
Hunting vulnerable schoolchildren also seems to be a new spring sport. The Nextdoor app, usually chock-full of lost cats, contains a spate of mothers reporting that their kids are being followed as they walk home, and beaten up, and that there\u2019s no one to turn to for help. The schools shrug, the police shrug, and woe betide anyone who tries to hold an offender\u2019s parents to account. If you returned from the encounter unhurt, you\u2019d soon find yourself formally accused of harassment.<\/p>\n
The more freeloaders there are, the closer everyone else comes to doing the same<\/p>\n
The decline of the Marquess estate at the bottom of my road, where in 2015 the teenager Stefan Appleton was stabbed to death in the playground, is in many ways telling. A friend of mine in her seventies, who grew up on the estate and brought her children up there, explained it to me. The estate is arranged in three layers of flats all surrounding a central green. It used to be, said my friend, that the older generation, the grandmothers, lived on the top floors and they\u2019d sit out on their balconies and keep their beady eyes on how everybody behaved. Any bullying or truancy and they\u2019d have a word with the parents. Public shaming worked.<\/p>\n
After right-to-buy and later, after migrant families were moved in, the self-policing fell apart. The cockneys, my friend among them, moved east, and in the absence of elders, the\u00a0norms themselves began to change. Within each cultural bubble perhaps conventions held. But the shared ethic, learnt by children in schools, was that their duty was not to their neighbour but to themselves and possibly the planet which their neighbour was likely polluting. They learnt that all stigma must always be lifted and that the gravest sin was to judge. Then smartphones took over and the idea of a shared public space fragmented further into a frogspawn of private spaces.<\/p>\n
If Britain is shameless, it\u2019s because shaming \u2013 meaning expressing disapproval of any public behaviour \u2013 has become not a virtue but the cardinal sin. Just a few years ago, it was quite normal to tut over flagrant violations of our unspoken code. If someone was having a loud one-sided phone call on train, or talking through a movie, or sitting scrolling on a bus while a frail octogenarian stood nearby, or dumping their chips by the bus stop, they\u2019d be tutted at. Just imagine doing that now. You\u2019d be thumped, derided as a \u2018Karen\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u2018Loyalty, integrity, community\u2019, read the banners in support of Sean Egan. The movement behind him is still growing and, sensing the way the wind blows, several MPs and the head of the Met and other big supermarket chains have now said they\u2019re on Sean\u2019s side, and that the thieving has to stop. Perhaps everyone\u2019s beginning to understand that if Britain is to end its slide into shamelessness, we need all the Karens and all the Seans we can find.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he\u2019d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,61,3185,3213],"class_list":{"0":"post-25356","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-crime","10":"tag-morrisons","11":"tag-shoplifting"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116490563320418904","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}