San Francisco’s shoplifting epidemic is shocking to behold. But we shouldn’t imagine that the same couldn’t happen here. In fact, we’re well on our way. According to the British Retail Consortium, theft from stores across 10 UK cities is up by 26%. More, “incidents of violence and abuse against retail employees have almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels.”

On Tuesday, Asda Chairman Stuart Rose told LBC that “theft is a big issue. It has become decriminalised. It has become minimised. It’s actually just not seen as a crime anymore.”

In the absence of an adequate response from the authorities, retailers are beginning to take defensive measures. For instance, home furnishings company Dunelm is now locking up duvets and pillow cases in cabinets; Waitrose is offering free coffees to police officers to increase their visibility; and Tesco plans to equip staff with body cameras. 

The “progressive” response to this phenomenon isn’t quite as deranged as it is in in the US. Nevertheless, British liberals have responded as expected. A piece in the Observer is typical. You’ll never guess, but apparently it’s all the Tories’ fault: “Starving your population and then ‘cracking down’ on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.”

But as the writer ought to know, the issue here isn’t the desperate young mum hiding a few groceries in the pram. Nor is it the schoolboy pilfering the occasional bag of sweets. Rather, the real problem is blatant, organised and sometimes violent theft of higher value items. Criminals who never previously thought they could get away with it increasingly now do — thus presenting a material threat to retail as we know it. 

But instead of addressing the issue head-on, the writer blames the victim: “Once goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking.” How terribly irresponsible of them! On the other hand, perhaps the open display of goods isn’t just a convenience for customers, but instead the hallmark of a high trust society. 

In fact, modern shops are a minor miracle of civilisation: public spaces, stacked high with products from all over the world, that passing strangers may freely inspect and handle, but which aren’t looted by anyone who feels like it.

Surely, that’s something worth defending. But if you’d prefer to abandon retailers to their fate, then don’t moan when they do what it takes to survive. Some will close, of course, and others will move their operations online. Those who stay open will guard themselves and their stock behind plexiglass and electronic tags. And then there’s the hi-tech solution: the fully automated and completely cashless store, in which customers have to be authenticated to even get in. 

Remember that retail facilities like this already exist. One day, when they become the norm, we’ll remember what shops used to be like. Then, we’ll ask why no one stood up for them.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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Strangling, punching or violently yanking someone by the hair is assault. Film the same acts, upload them to a porn site, and suddenly they become sacred emblems of free speech. For years, global porn platforms have been shielded from consequences by armies of lawyers, lobbyists and anti-censorship campaigners who claim they are defending the little guy. Now, after three decades of regulatory paralysis, Parliament is attempting to take back control from the pornocrats.

Earlier this week, peers backed amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that would ban certain types of pornography. Incest “step” porn, which has flourished online under the thinnest narrative disguises, is set to be outlawed. So too is material produced by adults that explicitly recreates child sexual abuse scenarios. Platforms will also be required to maintain a verifiable paper trail proving performers’ ages and their consent.

To date, creating laws that porn producers can’t find ways around has proven tricky. The existing law on extreme pornography is rarely enforced, and, notably, the overwhelming majority of prosecutions involve bestiality. This is not because animal abuse is especially popular, but because animals are recognised as incapable of giving consent. The corollary is that when women are subjected to “acts likely to result in serious injury to [their] anus, breasts or genitals”, the law assumes consent.

But this touches on a wider point: that the Government is struggling to enforce the technicality of its laws. The Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, is being implemented gradually by Ofcom. Since 2025, platforms have been required to carry out risk assessments for illegal content and introduce measures such as age checks. Yet enforcement remains limited. Ofcom has opened more than 20 investigations and issued only a handful of fines. The most high-profile was a £1.05 million penalty against the parent company of OnlyFans for providing inaccurate information about its age-verification system.

Enforcement remains a problem, but it’s the themes in the broader debate that have so far stopped progress. During the debate on the bill, Baroness Bertin condemned “the status quo that has allowed abuse, misogyny, paedophilia and the exploitation of women and girls to flourish”. The Epstein files, she argued, should be our moment of reckoning.

Branding categories like “barely legal” as a fig leaf for the sexualisation of children, she captured what most people instinctively understand but have been reluctant to say. We have come to this point due to the obtuseness of the pro-porn side, who say “barely legal” was just a matter of freedom.

Progress has been slow because being anti-porn is neither sexy nor high-status. It invites the familiar sneers: dried-up prude, joyless censor, enemy of art and foe of freedom. The response to such accusations is simple: open the world’s most popular free pornography site, Pornhub, and read aloud whatever greets users on the landing page. What is portrayed in mainstream pornography is neither artistic nor erotic: it is monetised misogyny.

Labour has pledged to treat violence against women and girls as a national emergency. That cannot sit alongside an online ecosystem which packages humiliation, coercion and incest as mainstream entertainment. The internet is not an autonomous moral zone. It is part of our civic life, and should be governed accordingly. If politicians are serious about confronting sexism, they cannot confine themselves to denouncing Andrew Tate while leaving the culture that incubates him untouched.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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