Downing Street is, apparently, going to hold a summit on shoplifting very soon.
There is, apparently, no planned summit on 1 million children living in poverty.
Nor is there a planned summit on how people can make ends meet when their savings run out.
Nor is there any mention of one on relief for homeowners caught with mortgage costs they could never have anticipated.
And there is no summit on the increase in private sector rents.
Instead, shoplifting is to be the subject of the summit.
The choice is indicative of the attitude of those in power. The question that will no doubt be asked will not be about why there is more shoplifting. It will instead be about how threats, sanctions, more policing and security measures can end it by imposing harsher sanctions on those who are caught.
What, I am fairly sure, will not be noticed is that the cause of all these issues is the same. The shoplifting crisis is not being caused by an outbreak of wanton criminality. It is being driven by economic desperation.
That is the desperation which comes from poverty.
It is the desperation that a parent feels when they cannot feed their child. It is not chance that baby formula is such a commonly shoplifted item.
And what can be done about all these issues is the same.
It is not more criminal sanctions. It is not more security. It is not longer sentencing.
It is, instead, cuts in interest rates that are needed, very urgently.
It is also caps on rents.
And real cuts in energy costs.
It is measures to reduce food prices.
And it is support for inflation matching pay rises, most especially for the lowest paid.
Those are the measures needed to tackle the increase in shoplifting.
I bet none of them will be on the agenda.
And of course that makes me angry.
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“The shoplifting crisis is not being caused by an outbreak of wanton criminality. It is being driven by economic desperation.”
I grew up the 1960s and 70s and my parents were very poor. They chose not to shoplift. Same goes for the vast majority of those in a similar situation, then and now. Shop theft puts up prices for those who are honest. It’s not a victimless crime, everyone suffers. What next? Is mugging someone OK if you are poor and the victim rich?
You insult that vast majority by providing excuses for a small minority.
Please do not insult me.
Of course, I am not excusing shop lifting.
I am, of course, aware that shoplifting imposes a cost on society.
I also know that shoplifting can traumatise shop staff.
I also appreciate that some outbreaks of apparently organised, violent, shoplifting, are blatantly criminal and so quite unrelated to what I describe.
But, most shoplifting is not of that sort. Most shoplifting its of the time that I describe. It is undertaken by people who are desperate because society has abandoned them. All that you prove is that society really has done that, at least as you see it. That makes you the problem, and not the solution.
I am excusing nothing. At the same time I want to take away the cause of the most shoplifting. Please tell me what is wrong with seeking to do so?
“But, most shoplifting is not of that sort. Most shoplifting its of the time that I describe.”
How can you observe this from your middle class pile in leafy middle england?
Have you haerd of data?
I notice you did not engage with the other points RM made. I
n terms of prices, by far the biggest impact on prices is the cartel of supermarkets that control prices & which successive “governments” (I use the term loosely to describe the current & future political rabble) have failed to address. This more than anything else is what extracts excess money from your pocket (and indeed from, for example, farmers which supply the grocery chains). Shoplifting has a trivial impact.
For myself, if I saw somebody stealing from a corner shop, I would try and stop them. If I saw somebody stealing from a supermarket chain, I’d look the other way. One has to have a perspective about all this.
The big supermarkets have got the govt over a barrel. Either they get what they want or they shut up shop and the nation starves. They should never have been allowed to get this position. However, this seems to me to be an inevitable consequence of allowing the nation to be run by groups of people with very short-term careers and therefore short-term horizons coupled with short-term thinking. What gets the nation through the next few months or years might work well from their perspective but not for the nation as when that short-term solution collapses all we ever get presented with is another short-term solution. The nation can’t be run by politicians, that’s self-evident, and we have to stop children being conditioned to think what we live in is in any way natural and normal if our bright young minds are going to come up with any sort of a solution to this mess. I’m reading https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity-ebook/dp/B08WCL3V7Q/ref=sr_1_1?crid=6GLBOC024SWP&keywords=david+graeber&qid=1698140149&s=books&sprefix=david+graeber%2Cstripbooks%2C75&sr=1-1 just now and it has some interesting perspectives on Western societies in general. Recommended.
Is “mugging” someone OK if you are rich and the victim is poor? This effectively mirrors current societal circumstances—the exploitation of the vulnerable and impoverished.
Society’s structure is crumbling under the weight of considerable inequality and rampant corruption. Individuals are progressively realizing they are being manipulated by major corporations and their purported leaders. The uptick in petty theft merely represents one manifestation of an increasingly dysfunctional society.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, in considerable poverty. Most people didn’t shoplift, well most of the time, because their local shops were part of the community, and in those days many shops were marginal businesses. Most babies were breastfed, and even then formula (as it was) was expensive. Lots of kids were hungry, and we were just losing the rickets generation thanks to the NHS and school milk. Most people where I lived (east of Oldham) were poor, and it is still one of the poorest places in UK. Shoplifting was reserved for big stores and easy targets like markets in other towns, and was also rare because there were many coppers on the beat. Things regularly ‘fell off the back of the lorry’, etc. So stop being so pious. People were no more honest than today.
Agreed
And cash in hand was vastyly more common
I was unemployed for 9 months in the early 1970’s a victim of MrsT’s policy of stopping making things and transferring to a service economy. I didn’t have to steal as my benefits, included family allowance for all children, mortgage interest paid job full, unemployment benefit, and help in finding work that suits me, mostly in my case proof reading letters of application, and in the days before PCs access to a typist who produced wonderful looking CVs. And quality paper and envelopes, and postage.
The state supported me, it did not throw me to the wolves of the finance industry.
Building Societies were mutuals then so we’re supportive too.
Quite so
We are entering the theatre of the absurd as the Tories drain into the sewer they have created.
But I feel that everyone else is being dragged down with them too.
After what will be 14/15 years of this, it is not an election that we need but a period truth and reconciliation.
Who will deliver this? Another open goal that will be missed.
“We don’t need a No 10 summit on shoplifting. ”
I disagree, we do. Shoplifting is a serious crime & needs to be thoroughly investigated.
Naturally there are different categories of theft, ranging from thirsty & hungry stealing food from a shop (trivial & a social problem) through to greedy, dishonest, lying politicos, stealing from the country and reducing it to penury (criminal and worthy of investigation and custodial sentences). Given Tory1 & 2 like the corner shop model for government accounting – what they have been doing is stealing from the UK corner shop till. For decades.
Naturally, Tory1 and Tory2 want to investigate the former (individual), rather than the latter (political party/politicos) stealing. Tory1 is doing this to see how far Kid Starver and the Tory2 politburo will follow (probably a long way – given Kid Starver has declared himself in favour of hungry children – with his nodding dogs doing what they do). This is all about headlines in The Scum and the Daily Heil – the desparate last throws of a Tory1 gov out of gas, out of time and out of its tiny mind.
It would have been nice if No.10 considered a summit on the PPE procurement during Covid, or how many of their MPs are raking it in and who from. But no. We’ll get this instead.
What a joke.
Selfish and feeble minded people in power who can’t recognise a nation works better when everybody pulls together for the well-being of all. Britain’s always been a pathetic nation in this respect!
I agree that we’ve become pathetically inept at recognising the value of working together. Though I think one of the home nations is far far worse in this regard than the others. I’m sure I don’t need to state which nation I’m referring to.
One of my (English born) sisters lives in central Wales. Since moving there, she has learnt Welsh and has held two town clerks roles. She gets a great communal response from the locals and the old hippie type incomers; she gets ‘speak to the hand’ and rude social media comments from the Tory-voting English, especially the second-homers.
I became aware of this about a year ago when buying some door catches in Homebase, priced at approximately £5 and £11 pounds. I expressed surprise that both items were locked onto the stand and the assistant explained that they were losing ever increasing amounts of stock. Of course….. in these times of contsantly increasing poverty why would I be surprised….?! People are desperate, and even the organised gangs wouldn’t have such ready clients to sell on to if they weren’t. To many people it can feel like a victimless crime (I know it isn’t) – why wouldn’t it as shopping has become increasingly impersonal with fewer and fewer staff, and often only self checkouts? And advertising of all products continues unabated on all media. Every time I hear this on the news I fail to understand why the subject of widespread poverty is never brought up. We live in an ever more punitive culture that the years of Tory government have rolled out … in every aspect of life!! If it wasn’t for the kindness I still see around me I would be in utter despair, but to live in this culture is truly exhausting. The mental health crisis we have is surely a totally understandable, even rational, response to an unkind and dysfunctional system.
I agree with your conclusion
It is so obviously true
What I would add to the discussion is that as far as I can see there are a number of areas of crime that are not ‘policed’ Fraud and Waste Crime being the most obvious examples, and Shoplifting has become another.
As a result ‘organised’ crime moves in.
Again a consequence of cuts in ‘Law Enforcement’
This of course is on top of the ‘Cost of Living’ crisis and growing poverty.
Thank you Richard for your firm – and courteous – response to Dermot. What you say in your posting is well supported by Frances Ryan’s article in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/tories-poverty-destitute-history-politics.
I read what Frances had to say after I had written.
She makes her case very well.
Re:- Schofield @ 8:54am; “…a nation works better when everybody pulls together for the well-being of all. Britain’s always been a pathetic nation in this respect!”
One exceptional period (from which I have benefitted) would be the three decades post-WW2. During that time, the pre-war socialist ideals of Tom Johnston came to be implemented nationally; e.g. an ‘all-in’ social insurance covering unemployment, health & pensions. William Beveridge rightly gets the credit for introducing ‘the welfare state’ across the UK but there were local precursors.
As historian Tom Devine notes “Johnston was a giant figure in Scottish politics and is revered to this day as the greatest Scottish Secretary of the century”.
Perhaps we should nod too to Iron Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck who seems to have devised social security “Bismarck was motivated to introduce social insurance in Germany both in order to promote the well-being of workers in order to keep the German economy operating at maximum efficiency, and to stave-off calls for more radical socialist alternatives.” https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html
But fear not. The cap on bankers’ bonuses is to be scrapped.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67206997
I am sure the extra wealth they generate will trickle own -well. at some point.
A government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich.
Indeed
A dispiriting quote from Steve Keen, Building a new Economics…
“On October 10, 2022, I realised that there was no hope of ever reforming mainstream economics, since on that date, Ben Bernanke and two other Neoclassicals were awarded the “Nobel” Prize in economics for their work on banking. They assumed the validity of the “loanable funds” model of how banks operate—as Bernanke said in his biographical note on the Nobel website, “banks and other lenders are themselves borrowers, since they must raise funds from deposits or in capital markets in order to lend”. And yet that model had been flatly contradicted years earlier by the Bank of England”
We must gird our loins…there’s a long battle ahead.
Well said, Steve.
I agree that it is deplorable that the government has created such economic desperation.
Doubtless it leads to some shoplifting.
However perhaps an additional cause is that police do not answer the majority of calls for assistance with shoplifting. So criminal gangs know they can get away with it. We should not blame only the police because they too have been starved of resources. And, even if shoplifters were arrested and convicted, they could not be jailed because the government has starved our prison service of resources.
A summit on shoplifting doesn’t even start to address the government’s failings.
Most people are aware of the limited ability of shop security staff to respond. I was working in Asda when a shoplifter (in a different store) was chased through the store car park by security after he had put some bottles of spirits in the front of his coat. He tripped and fell onto the bottles and, very sadly, died. Store security staff instructions were changed quite fundamentally after that.
But, as has been mentioned, it is not just the people taking a chance because they are desperate, it is also the increase in those, who would have considered themselves law abiding, prepared to buy a ‘bargain’. Professional shoplifting, generally, relies on having a market.
Absolutely and it’s the witless out of touch govt who’ve created that market and continue to foster it. I’m greatly encouraged by the current shoplifting as I see it as the first signs of a growing very necessary civil disorder. Ideally this shouldn’t be happening, but in a culture where the majority have clearly been abandoned by their political classes, what other reasonable response is there? People have to live… much more of this to come, I’m sure.
I remember reading not so long ago about a Tesco manager who told his staff to look the other way if they saw someone in obvious poverty stealing things like beans, etc., to feed their families.
I hope they have lots of people like these giving evidence, anonymously, of course.
I’ve noticed in my local supermarket that there is often very little food put in the foodbank box any more. How are people supposed to eat?
We were poor, living in Hull in the 50s and 60s. I remember my brother stealing sweets from Woolworths. When my mother found out she took him to the police box on the main road and told the policeman who was there. What’s a policebox? Not even a police station now. He was given a warning.
On a lighter note, I tried to search for the shoplifting article , and was given links to jobs for shoplifters!! Through real employment agencies. Urgently needed, apparently.
I call this shoplifting.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/big-pharma-is-rinsing-the-nhs-take-action
You write, Richard, “It is cuts in interest rates that are needed … caps on rents … measures to reduce food prices … it is support for inflation matching pay rises, most especially for the lowest paid.”
Yes – yes – yes – yes!
“And real cuts in energy costs”? Yes for basic minimum energy usage – but ‘No’ after that. Prices should escalate for higher usage until, if they have their own pools, ministers might choose to swim in cold water.
Why?
Last week the Tyndall Centre reported, “Adaptation to 2 metres of sea-level rise should start today.
The IPCC AR6 makes clear that 2-m of sea-level rise will be exceeded sooner or later and this must be considered in all future coastal development” explained Robert Nicholls, Director of the Tyndall Centre and co-author of a latest paper about multi-meter sea-level rise published in Environmental Research Letters. Unlike other climate change impacts, sea levels will not stop rising as temperatures stabilise, continuing to rise for hundreds to thousands of years, even if average global warming was stabilised at 1.5C in line with the UN Paris Agreement. (https://tyndall.ac.uk/news/adaptation-to-2-metres-of-sea-level-rise-should-start-today/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=adaptation-to-2-metres-of-sea-level-rise-should-start-today)
Today, the Guardian has published Nature, Climate Change research: “Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, putting coastal cities in danger.
If lost completely, the ice sheet of west Antarctica would *push up the oceans by 5 metres*. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/23/rapid-ice-melt-in-west-antarctica-now-inevitable-research-shows)
Thanks Joe