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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In recent weeks, the Republican Party’s rifts over issues ranging from US policy toward Israel to AI regulation have been widely reported. Public debates among Democrats, in contrast, have been strangely muted. This was emphasised last month when the Democratic National Committee decided not to release its long-awaited “autopsy” report about what went wrong for the Party in the disastrous elections of 2024. This is no coincidence. The GOP truly is divided, but the Democrats, despite real internal disagreements, are more homogeneous on major issues than they have ever been. The two American parties today can be described as the anti-Democrats and the Democrats.

Divisions within today’s Democratic Party are limited and public debates are rare. In foreign policy, Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has divided Democrats along ethnic, ideological and generational lines. But there are no raging debates over policy toward Russia and China, comparable to those that split the Party during the Cold War.

In domestic policy, democratic socialists and progressives can be distinguished from more business- and market-friendly neoliberals. But criticism of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a socialist — from what passes for the Right-wing of the Democrats has been tame. And on issues like trade, which as recently as a decade ago split the Party between free traders and protectionists, there are no clear factions or stances, other than condemning whatever the Trump administration is doing at the moment.

On social issues like abortion and trans rights, there is little daylight between factions. In the Seventies, 125 House Democrats were pro-life. Today, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas has been described as “the last anti-abortion Democrat”. He has been targeted by progressive Democrats and pardoned by Trump for bribery charges.

After Democratic losses in 2024 were attributed by some to pro-trans policies, Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton told the New York Times that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that”. Progressive Democrats denounced Moulton, while moderate Democrats failed to come to his defence.

On issues like immigration, apparent Democratic divisions seem to be more about public rhetoric than substantive policy. For example, Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group, advises Democrats to use tough language on immigration, a topic on which only 34% of Americans trust the Democrats more than the Republicans. However, the “centrists” at Third Way endorse policies like increasing the number of immigration judges to hear asylum claims and legalising all immigrants “who have been convicted of violent crimes”.

The absence of deep policy rifts and bitter public debates in today’s Democratic Party reflects the social and cultural homogeneity of the college-educated whites who, along with black voters, make up the base of the Party. The policy differences among upper-middle-class white Democrats today are minor, compared to those that divided northern Catholic union members, upper-class Southern segregationists, and social democrats from the New Deal to the Reagan era. Upscale urban “Abundance Democrats” who favour densification, mass transit, and renewable energy may dislike obstructions to construction that result from public sector unions and excessive environmental regulations. But otherwise, they are hard to distinguish from upscale urban progressives who support Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and also favour densification, mass transit, and renewable energy.

In contrast, the Republican Party today is best described as the anti-Democratic Party. In the age of Trump, the GOP is a coalition of strange bedfellows, subcultures and warring factions, many of which used to vote for the Democratic Party. They share little or nothing in common other than opposition to one or another aspect of present-day Democratic orthodoxy.

There are Republican trade union members who object to Democratic immigration policies and social liberalism. They co-exist with Republican business owners and managers who want to crush unions, means-test or privatise Social Security, and repeal the New Deal, while bringing in more immigrant cheap labour.

Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics object to Democratic support for abortion, gay rights, and transgender ideology. Pro-Trump Silicon Valley tycoons tend to be libertarians — and libertines — who don’t like Democratic support for higher taxes, regulation of tech, and worker power. Republicans enjoy an advantage among white voters and men who resent Democratic support for anti-white and anti-male discrimination in the name of DEI and affirmative action.

Paleoconservative isolationists oppose neoconservative globalists. Along with these factions, Republicans attract small subcultures who dislike other aspects of establishment progressivism, like fans of classical art and architecture who detest modern art, or rural voters or coastal voters who despise giant wind farms.

The second Trump administration has tried to give many of these disparate opponents of Democratic orthodoxy what they want. But there is no coherent Right-wing philosophy from which it is possible to deduce the Republican programme of opposition to trans ideology, immigration restriction, tax cuts for the rich, hostility to wind and solar power, and preference for classical buildings and monuments. If you take the national Democratic platform and just reverse the policies it calls for, you end up more or less with current Republican policy.

The reactive nature of the Republicans, as an anti-Democratic coalition with no coherent agenda of its own, means that the Democrats by default have set the national agenda and may continue to do so. In the last generation, on issue after issue, from green energy to trans rights to massively increasing both legal and illegal immigration, a relatively united Democratic Party has pushed a policy against which Republicans have reacted, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Regardless of who succeeds Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, this structural pattern is unlikely to change. Democrats propose; Republicans oppose.