{"id":8228,"date":"2026-04-07T11:21:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/8228\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T11:21:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:21:13","slug":"law-and-order-has-evaporated-in-britain-these-three-incidents-prove-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/8228\/","title":{"rendered":"Law and order has evaporated in Britain \u2013 these three incidents prove it"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last week there have been no fewer than three shocking instances of group criminality on Britain\u2019s high streets<\/a>. First, a \u201clink-up\u201d flash mob of hundreds of teenagers ransacked shops in Clapham, south London, assaulting several people in the process.<\/p>\n

Next, a horde of Pok\u00e9mon fans \u2013 of all people! \u2013 smashed in the locked shutters of Sports Direct on Oxford Street, while police stood by and watched.<\/p>\n

Finally Take Back Power<\/a>, a characteristically entitled offshoot of Just Stop Oil, announced they would be stepping up their campaign of shoplifting to \u201cliberate\u201d food from supermarkets, following a series of such actions in March.<\/p>\n

Each incident has different roots and motivations, but together they represent a new and concerning step in the collapse of law and order on high streets in the UK.<\/p>\n

This problem didn\u2019t start here. It began with an uptick of unpunished shoplifting<\/a> over recent years, which has only accelerated. It is now routine to see thieves walking into cafes, bakeries, shops and supermarkets, filling their pockets or even holdalls, and leaving without paying. They have, it seems, not a care in the world.<\/p>\n

The British Retail Consortium\u2019s annual crime survey refers to \u201crepeat and increasingly brazen offending\u201d, costing retailers hundreds of millions of pounds a year in direct losses and almost a \u00a31bn in preventative measures<\/a>. In the words of Thinus Keeve, Marks & Spencer\u2019s retail director: \u201cI keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London \u2013 something none of us believe and very few people working in retail would see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shockingly, the high street crime wave also involved 590,000 incidents of violence and abuse targeted at retail staff<\/a>. That\u2019s 1,600 people working in shops who suffer an experience like this every single day. Thirty-six incidents a day involve weapons, which helps to explain why many big retailers now have a \u201cdon\u2019t intervene\u201d policy forbidding staff from trying to stop the thefts happening right in front of them.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, such policies were limited to bank staff who were ordered not to confront armed robbers, for fear they would be killed. Now this is the case for thefts of crisps and vodka. <\/p>\n

Smaller shops, of course, often do not have the luxury of the big chains to simply let stolen goods walk out of the door. Speaking to some of those families who run convenience stores, I\u2019ve heard truly terrifying stories of mothers and fathers who feel they are trapped between letting thieves destroy their livelihoods or having to risk their own lives.<\/p>\n

This hasn\u2019t happened by accident. The fact that the law treats thefts below the value of \u00a3200 as \u201clow-value\u201d, and with accordingly lighter punishments, was wrongly interpreted by some police forces as a reason to downgrade or even disregard it. The thieves are not completely illogical: they saw that police were unlikely to even attend such crimes \u2013 and still less likely to arrive in time to intervene or successfully arrest the perpetrators \u2013 so they developed shoplifting as an organised business model. You can steal a lot if you do it full-time at \u00a3200 a go.<\/p>\n

In other words, the sight of officers on Oxford Street the other day, standing round as a mob smashed in the locked doors of a shop, may be shameful but it is also emblematic of what has become a systemic failure. In large parts of the country, the police effectively surrendered an important part of the public sphere to organised criminality. <\/p>\n

The outcome of making the law into an ass in this way is, predictably, that a growing number of people now believe they can break it with impunity. So they do. Those who do it for profit are now being joined by those doing it for fun and those doing it to try to make some wrongheaded political point. All have taken it up because they can see that this supposedly \u201cminor\u201d crime can often be committed without consequence.<\/p>\n

Well, it isn\u2019t minor any more \u2013 and it should never have been treated as if it were.<\/p>\n

The government surely realises that this is politically as well as economically challenging. If you want to convince people that you are doing your job and improving people\u2019s lives, it\u2019s hard to get that point across when cheese and meat are routinely wrapped with security tags. When the Prime Minister seeks to reassure voters that he is acting on the cost of living, his audience are fuming that their shopping bills go up and up while they see thieves pick stuff off the shelves and simply walk out with it. The sense is growing that those who do the right thing by choice are treated like idiots, and penalised for doing so.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s a more fundamental problem. Most people not unreasonably see the maintenance of law and order as a core duty of the state. If, in return for their record high taxes, they don\u2019t even get a government which can keep control of the high street, that deepens the sense that nothing works any more.<\/p>\n

The government relies, every day, on press releases, speeches and interviews to communicate what they are doing. New laws, new policies, new initiatives are all announced to try to assure voters that they are delivering their mandate for change. But if you nip to the supermarket and see the law defied without consequence<\/a>, what reason have you to believe that any of it means anything at all? Fail to deliver this most essential duty, and ministers may as well shut up shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the last week there have been no fewer than three shocking instances of group criminality on Britain\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,61,4154,27,4155,1930,1933],"class_list":{"0":"post-8228","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-high-street","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-policing","13":"tag-retail","14":"tag-shops"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116363164808044538","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228","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=8228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}