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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News that Reform UK is abandoning promises to renationalize utilities such as water and energy reveals the direction of travel for Britain’s populist Right. After months of watching the slow drip of high-profile Tory defections, along with renewed promises of fiscal prudence over deficit-financed tax cuts, the U-turn on public ownership has cemented the party’s latest pivot. It is now less an insurgent force, and more the new default vehicle for the UK’s mainstream center-right.

It would always have been awkward to hear Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick arguing convincingly for positions more reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour than their own former party. Now all of them will be spared that indignity.

But as a shapeless Reform struggles to find a permanent identity that goes beyond the “Stop the Boats” mantra, Nigel Farage’s party is losing its outsider edge. With figures like Jenrick in senior positions, Reform has moved obligingly back towards the 50-year diagnostic/prescription manual of the British Right: too much state, too much immigration — so less of both, please.

The siren voices that advised the Faragists to accept Tory ship-jumpers with open arms cited the fledgling populists’ lack of governing experience: get some credible, recognized politicians on board, and doubts about your ability to wield power will fade away. Alas, this position always misunderstood Reform’s unique appeal as an anti-political, plague-on-both-your-houses outfit — a means to burn down the whole Westminster machine. Nobody was eyeing an ascendant Farage because he appeared to be operationally competent, or an able administrator for the failing ship of state. With experienced former ministers on board, the momentum behind the party has dissipated rather than built.

It is a perennial mistake of political commentators and activists to ascribe the charge of incoherence to movements whose politics do not fit neatly on the traditional Left-Right continuum. That’s why the Conservative hierarchy resorted to accusations of “socialism” when Reform began to break out of the one-dimensional spectrum with appeals to renationalization and scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

But for the average “normie”, politics is a much more à la carte experience than it is for the rigid, partisan ideologues, with their set menu of policy opinions. For the non-obsessives, who do not define themselves ideologically but instead through broad affiliation to a diffuse “common sense” view of the world, there’s no reason why someone’s opinion on mass migration should have any bearing on their tolerance for high taxes. Nor should a person’s views on capital punishment be a certain predictor of their views on public ownership of the utilities, or on trade unions.

There were signs, once, that Farage understood this. Reform would break the mold. For the Left, the tragedy of this is that the party’s leadership is composed of libertarian, Austrian School true believers, who nevertheless draw on Boomer nostalgia for a social-democratic, postwar age of industrial statism. The Reform base for Making Britain Great Again harks back longingly to an era of economic security, with a sense of social cohesion and mass common culture that a closed, strictly national, Fordist economy and a top-down state provided.

In promising to nationalize utilities and rebuild lost manufacturing jobs, Reform was edging towards a kind of syncretic, big-tent populism that represented the genuine center ground of British politics. On the one hand was advocacy for an active state which intervened on behalf of the “man in the street” against rapacious corporations. On the other was the articulation of a robust patriotism, a desire for sustainable levels of migration, and a suspicion of cultural radicalism. It looks now like that project is over. Beneath the mask, the Conservative Party 2.0 has revealed itself.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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