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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“I don’t think there’s a farmer alive who’s Labour anymore,” celebrity petrolhead turned agricultural champion Jeremy Clarkson told Times Radio earlier this week.

Dramatic stuff, although it does raise the question of how many Labour-supporting farmers there were in the first place. The extinction of the dinosaurs was significant because they once ruled the world. Farmers who vote Labour, meanwhile, have long been a tiny minority. Though the most recent Farmers Weekly Sentiment Survey, published in January, found just 1% support for Labour among the group, this collapse came from the towering peak of… 4% at the last general election.

Paper after paper has been produced on “Labour’s Rural Problem”, a turn of phrase coined by Angela Eagle in a 2015 report that has defined all the party’s subsequent faltering efforts at countryside reconnection. “Rural” does not, however, necessarily mean “farming”. Despite its torrid years of rural rejection and 4% support among farmers, Labour managed to win 135 rural and semi-rural seats in 2024. A bright new dawn for red rosettes on country lanes appeared to be at hand.

Or not. Earlier this year, More in Common produced an MRP poll that predicted a rural wipeout for Labour. A generational opportunity for an electoral reset has seemingly been squandered in less than two years. The pollster chalked the countryside collapse up to the same issues vexing the rest of the country, but noted one vital accelerant to the bonfire of Labour support: the imposition of the family farm tax. Farmers may not deliver the rural vote singlehandedly, but farming is a totemic issue in the countryside, a signal of a Government’s priorities.

More in Common also pointed to the beneficiaries of the Labour retreat, the “formidable advance” of Reform UK. The latest Farmers Weekly Sentiment Survey found that backing for Reform had shot up from 15% in 2024 to 40% by the end of 2025, with Tory support falling from 57% to 28%. Clarkson made the same observation. Historically, the great majority of those votes could be expected to flow to the Conservative Party, yet Clarkson says the farmers he knows, particularly younger ones, are turning to Nigel Farage.

To an extent, this is likely an extension of the “ordinary voter” rule formulated this week by Labour MP Connor Naismith, commenting on trade-unionist support for Reform. Naismith is not surprised, because trade unionists are “normal working people”, and right now “normal working people” are clearly opting for Reform. The same is apparently true of farmers, probably more so because farmers are historically small-c conservative and Reform is at present the ascendant Right-wing party.

Another factor, as true for farmers as for everyone else, is the baggage of 14 years of Conservative government. The Tories carry with them the whiff of failure to deliver a post-Brexit settlement that works for farmers. The muddle-headed attempt to replace European Union payments with a system that rewarded environmental efforts, while negotiating trade deals with New Zealand and Australia, was characterized at the time as raising standards at home while lowering standards overseas.

So while young farmers feel personally targeted by Labour’s inheritance tax, which threatens their ability to take over their family farms, this uncertainty did not hit a farming sector confident in its own future. Farming was already suffering economic shocks, workforce issues and broken supply chains, for which many farmers lay the blame at the Tory door.

Reform UK is shiny and new, with no record to defend. No record, that is, other than Brexit itself. In 2023, a different Farmers Weekly survey found that 69% of farmers were “counting the cost of Brexit”, noting a negative impact on their business. Brexit is baked into the Reform brand, and while many farmers can look past this, some might view farmers climbing aboard the Farage train as akin to turkeys voting for Christmas.

A clean sweep of the farming community is therefore far from inevitable for Reform. Various agricultural woes stem from a Brexit many see as mishandled, though one thing we learned from the 2016 referendum is that appeals to economic pragmatism don’t fare well against campaigns that speak to the heart.

People often assume farmers will always “follow the money”, but there is a cultural thickness around agriculture that insulates it from utilitarian argument yet makes it hungry for rhetoric that honors the efforts of British farmers to feed the nation. Right now, Reform is winning that rhetorical battle with a patriotic, pro-farming message.

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Liam Stokes is a writer and environmentalist.

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