The socialist dystopia in which we live – and which started long before a Labour government made it worse – is highlighted by a statement made last week by George Weston, chief executive of Associated British Foods. Referring to one of ABF’s constituent brands, Primark, Mr Weston said the retailer annually lost more to shoplifting than it paid in business rates. It has 191 stores in Britain and pays £70 million rates annually. The effect on the company’s shareholders is, in more ways than one, criminal.
Shortly before Mr Weston’s despairing announcement, Paul Gerrard, who runs public affairs at the Co-op, reported that his staff were experiencing unprecedented levels of crime and abuse, with a 44 per cent increase year on year. Both executives mentioned organised shoplifting gangs, stealing to order. Mr Gerrard spoke of “people coming into our stores with wheelie bins, people coming into our store with builder’s bags to steal the whole confectionery section, the entire sprit section, the entire meat section”.
Aware that this might be a problem, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, intends to scrap the so-called £200 rule, which means that those shoplifting goods worth £199 or less can be tried in a magistrates’ court for a “summary” offence, carrying a maximum six months’ sentence. Those tried in a Crown Court can be sentenced to a maximum of seven years for theft.
The massive backlog in Crown Courts means a wait in some cases of more than two years before a trial. Cunning solicitors recommend that thieves opt for this if offered; they believe that juries are less likely to convict than a bench of magistrates and that, by the time the case is heard, the impact of the offence will seem much less. This cynicism suggests a different approach is needed.
Last month, when parts of the country were beset by riots, the courts responded to a state of ministerial near-panic by having those who were pleading guilty rushed into court ahead of other cases and punished in an exemplary fashion. It made the Government look as though it were in charge, it upheld in categorical terms the rule of law, and an immediate lesson was given to those who admitted riotous conduct.
No reasonable person could object to that – and indeed the courts continue to be tough, with a lout sent to jail for nine years on Friday for arson. The riots were perceived as a threat to public order, and allowed grandstanding by judges and politicians against the “far Right”, though all of that prompted accusations of two-tier policing.
Most rank-and-file police officers want to catch serious criminals and see them punished as a means not merely of providing justice, but of deterring others from similar behaviour. They must be as frustrated as retail bosses, and indeed small entrepreneurs who run round-the-clock family shops in urban areas, to see the law being violated in the present flagrant fashion.
Perhaps, for all Ms Cooper’s gestures, the Government simply believes that the capitalists who own shares in big retail companies, or who are developing family businesses, and who dare to flaunt their wealth by walking around wearing a £20,000 watch or even touting a brand new £1,500 smartphone, get all that is coming to them.
If the Government does privately take that view, it would be consistent with and related to two other long-running policies – that of the police giving up pursuing most burglars, and of the soft policing of supposedly “minor” drug offences. All of this is part of a pyramid of crime that leads straight back to international organised gangsterism – and it is destroying the concept of the rule of law upon which a supposedly civilised society such as ours is based.
Yes, I know that the prisons are full (so full we may be about to ship criminals to Estonia) and the police are overworked and the courts have yet to recover from the pandemic-induced backlog, but the Government is elected to rectify that. It should be clear from what the big retail bosses are saying that flagrant organised theft, usually to sell stolen goods on, is starting to cause serious damage not just to our moral system but to our economy.
That, to my mind, is as grave a threat to social stability as any mindless delinquents rioting or making vile racist remarks. If the Government could mobilise the police and the courts to tackle that at remarkably short notice, it owes it to those who go lawfully about their business to mobilise them rapidly again, to deal with this ugly and far from victimless crime.
Lock up for seven years – in Estonia or anywhere else you like – those with the wheelie-bins full of food and drink, and there is just a chance this loathsome epidemic of crime will stop. The alternative to failing to enforce and punish is to have retailing conducted under siege, which would make the criminals even more ruthless, and possibly murderous.
