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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New reports that SAS personnel are quitting in “substantial numbers” signal yet another warning light flashing on the dashboard for the British Army. However, whereas other crisis areas for military preparedness seem to be due to a chronic lack of funding and long-term Government negligence, the SAS issue is primarily the result of legal activism.

Last month it emerged, in a memo circulated by the service associations of the SAS and Special Reconnaissance Regiment, that there were 242 ongoing legal investigations into special forces personnel. Of these, just over half concerned currently serving members, while the remainder of the investigations looked at veterans. The scope of the investigations included the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Syria.

As a result, many elite troops are making the reasonable calculation that special forces operations are just too personally risky, in an environment where they are liable to be hounded by lawyers for the situations they encounter in the course of their duties.

The proportion of all those who enlist in the armed forces (itself a shrinking number) who are suitable for special forces selection is a fraction of a percent — and the amount of effort and resources invested into their training is huge, relative to the numbers involved. If even a handful decide to leave early as a result of legal liability, this represents a massive and irreplaceable loss to each cohort. And the reports suggest that the numbers doing so are considerably more than a handful.

How has it come to this? The extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) opened up individual service personnel to legal scrutiny in a manner that was not generally possible previously. In earlier times, a country would have had to lose a war in the manner that Germany and Japan did in 1945 for the decisions and behavior of individual servicemen acting under orders to face this kind of scrutiny in the courts. And even then, such investigations did not typically go down as far as the level of private soldiers and non-commissioned officers. But in an age where no limits are applied to the justiciability of human rights, nothing is beyond investigation.

Beginning in the late Nineties, a cadre of political campaigners with legal degrees began testing cases in the courts to establish precedent, which they hoped would constrain the behavior of governments in future conflicts. The intention was that warfare would be conducted in a manner compliant with human rights law — or, better yet, not conducted at all. Keir Starmer and his Attorney General Richard Hermer were both notable among this cohort of legal campaigners. In particular, they wanted to challenge the idea that covert operations were a legitimate element of warfare. If individual decision-makers were legally accountable, they would need public political cover.

The problem with this plan was that it relied on ministers with a sense of personal obligation to the troops they sent into battle. There has been relatively little sign that contemporary political figures are at all troubled by veterans facing legal repercussions for activities they carried out as part of their deployment. This is particularly the case of former New Labour ministers who introduced the Human Rights Act into law, and then sent troops into highly kinetic and legally contested theaters of war.

That this deters Britons from joining the special forces — or, for that matter, any area of the armed forces where they may have to make split-second life-or-death decisions — is such a painfully obvious question of basic incentives that it scarcely needs pointing out. The relentless persecution of Sergeant Martyn Blake in the wake of the shooting of the gangster Chris Kaba has had a similar effect on armed response units in the police.

However, the idea of leaving or reforming the ECHR remains untouchable to most of Britain’s political and legal establishment, not least the Prime Minister. Questions of national security, evidently, can’t be allowed to interfere.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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