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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This week, Donald Trump imposed new tariffs on 60 countries, including the UK, EU and Canada, escalating a trade war that has defined his second term. The move demonstrates the President’s persistence in attempting to reshape American foreign policy, despite numerous previous setbacks. But why are his tariffs proving so hard to implement legally?

In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump does not have the legal authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). This is an obscure 1977 law that allows the president to regulate “importation or exportation” during national emergencies. In addition to invalidating tariffs that had been imposed on China, Mexico, and Canada, the Court’s decision wiped out the “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump had imposed on more than 180 countries. To salvage something like these tariffs, he invoked yet another legislative authority: Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. This allows the president to impose 15% tariffs for up to 150 days without congressional authorisation, with an extension possible if needed.

These temporary Section 122 tariffs expired yesterday, and the new measures were subsequently invoked. Trump’s claimed tariff authority has jumped from the IEEPA to Section 122 to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The earlier tariffs were justified by the claim of a national emergency caused by US trade deficits, while the new measures have been put in place by the alleged need to combat forced labour. Countries that have taken steps to ban forced labour from their supply chains, such as the UK, are set to pay the lower rate of 10%, while others like Norway that have allegedly failed to do so will pay the full 12.5% penalty.

If a policy remains the same, but the way in which it is publicly justified changes, then clearly there is another underlying reason for its implementation. Trump’s unstated justification for maintaining these tariffs is the idea that the US should adopt a global or baseline levy on all trading partners that can be lowered in multilateral negotiations.

As a bargaining chip to begin trade negotiations, a baseline tariff makes perfect sense in theory, but it directly contradicts the theory of liberal internationalism. This utopian theory was identified by Britain’s William Gladstone and America’s Woodrow Wilson, which unfortunately became the basis for the economic and military arrangements of the post-1945 US alliance system.

According to the theory of liberal internationalism, wars are often caused by economic protectionism but carried out by national militaries. Achieving world peace therefore requires stripping states of the power to protect their producers and defend themselves unilaterally. All countries should renounce their economic sovereignty by permanently abandoning the use of tariffs and joining a regional or global free-trade order. At the same time, war can be avoided forever if states renounce their military sovereignty, delegating power to a quasi-world government such as the United Nations, or lesser regional alliances such as Nato or the EU.

Compared to this utopian ideal of liberal internationalism, Trump-style economic nationalism is more grounded in common sense and represents a long-overdue return to tradition. It was an accident of history that liberal internationalism was adopted by American leaders after the Second World War. All other great powers had been weakened or destroyed, and the so-called “liberal international order” and the zone of American military-commercial hegemony conveniently overlapped. In recent years, the rise of China and the revisionism of powers including Russia and Iran have resulted in the costs of American liberal internationalism outweighing the benefits to US citizens. In this sense, a retreat from global free trade and unilateral world policing was inevitable, even if Trump had never been elected.

The problem is that Trump wants to move the US back to its historic system in which protectionism was the norm, with limited, specific exceptions. But the President must work within an inherited structure of US and international trade law which assumes that free trade is the norm and any deviations must be justified. This is often done by complex investigations designed to slow down protectionist actions.

Until Congress radically revises obsolete trade laws to fit the new realities of our multipolar, neo-mercantilist world, American presidents will be forced to conceal their actual goals. Instead, like Trump, they will have to invoke obscure, long-dormant trade measures designed by 20th-century Wilsonian ideologues to promote a global free market in a post-national order that never properly existed and never can exist.