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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Next week, Andrew Yang will appear on Nation’s Dumbest, a new Fox game show in which celebrities compete in school-themed challenges to prove they are not the stupidest person in the room. His fellow contestants include the likes of JoJo Siwa (of Dance Moms fame), Steve-O (of Jackass fame), Hilaria Baldwin (of Alec Baldwin’s wife fame) and Dr Drew.

It is a remarkable comedown for Yang who, during the 2020 Democratic primaries, briefly became one of America’s most interesting political figures. Seven years ago, he was the smartest guy in the room, or at least the one most convinced of it, running on the slogan “Make America Think Harder”. He championed Universal Basic Income policies and so-called “Freedom Dividends” that would give Americans $1,000 a month, while warning anyone who’d listen that a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” was coming for American jobs.

Dave Chappelle campaigned for him, Jack Dorsey backed him, and a loud contingent online called themselves the Yang Gang. Another of his party’s slogans was “Not Left, Not Right, Forward”. Today, forward appears to lead to reality television, along with one of the dudes from Jackass.

Yet Yang’s slide into political irrelevance is interesting, given that he was right about so much. In 2019, he stood on a debate stage and argued that automation — not immigrants or trade deals — had hollowed out four million manufacturing jobs and would come next for truckers, retail workers, and call centers. At the time, it read like something out of sci-fi. Seven years later, though, white-collar workers are staring nervously at AI systems that can perform portions of their jobs, and Yang is once again warning that mass layoffs are coming.

His Freedom Dividend was mocked as free money; now some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names have arrived at their own versions of Yang’s argument about distributing the wealth created by AI. Even his lesser-known ideas hold up. His Local Journalism Fund — a billion dollars in grants to keep newsrooms alive — now appears prescient from inside the graveyard that local news has become. Being early in politics can be indistinguishable from being wrong. Yang got the diagnosis right, then watched other people take over the conversation.

Another problem is that there is little juice left in political centrism, especially Yang’s brand. His pitch was “solutions-based democracy”: not Left, not Right, just data and good-faith problem-solving. That proposition assumes a political marketplace that no longer exists. The centrists who remain have sorted themselves into tribes defined by what they’re against — Never Trump Republicans, Anyone But The Left Democrats — or which are gathered around Ezra Klein’s Abundance agenda, which at least has the good sense to attach itself to one of the two parties that actually win elections. Yang instead founded the Forward Party in 2021, a third party for the hollow center. Half a decade on, its triumphs include minor-party status in New Mexico and endorsing four independent Senate long-shots.

This points to the next problem: the man himself. Yang has good ideas and scattershot execution, a founder’s brain with a founder’s attention span. Why did the MATH guy run for mayor of New York in 2021 (he finished fourth)? Why launch a third party in the most hostile two-party system in the democratic world? Last year, he started Noble Mobile, a phone carrier that pays customers to use their phones less while hosting phone-free parties to promote it. His book this year, Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?, landed with a thud. As one Goodreads reviewer put it: “There are politician books that are bad because they were ghostwritten. There are others that are so bad that you wish they were ghostwritten, which unfortunately is the case on this one.”

There’s something fitting, then, about Nation’s Dumbest. It’s a show where the object is to prove you’re not the dumbest — a competition of pure negative definition, which is also the only kind of politics the American center has left. Yang deserved better than this. Or, at least, his ideas did. The automation crisis he predicted has arrived on schedule. The man who predicted it will be on Fox next Wednesday, sitting through a fake parent-teacher conference, hoping to get voted off.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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