Scourge of the theft gangs who swoop mob handed
to freely plunder our shops
As I collected my medication, my wife struck up a conversation with the pharmacist’s wife, who was hovering at the door like a sentinel.
When I got back, the talk was of shoplifting, which costs us all £1.8 billion a year, making it the crime of the century.
The woman had just foiled a thief who tried to run off with a bottle of expensive perfume. Now she was awaiting his return.
They always come back because the crime is so easy, so lucrative and so devoid of consequences.
“We have to stop them,” said the pharmacist’s wife. “Even if the cost is a punch in the face for me.”
New Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to crack down on shoplifting. Cue billowing smoke and a wilderness of mirrors.
She said Labour would scrap the rule that means police seldom investigate thefts of goods worth less than £200.
She also promised more police patrols in town centres and tougher laws on assaults against shop workers.
When we left the chemist’s shop a building across the road stood as an ironic reminder of the futility of those pledges. It was our old police station, empty, waiting to be turned into flats for well-heeled pensioners.
They say that part of the deal with developers is that they will provide a “facilities space” – a hut, a broom cupboard? – where officers can charge their body-worn cameras, iPads and radios.
Well, thank goodness! We can all sleep sound in our beds again.
What Cooper and most politicians fail to grasp is that laws are no good unless they are policed. Where are these extra police patrols going to come from? Who exactly is going to protect the shopkeepers?
Shoplifting is now carried out by organised crime gangs, often foreign. They don’t wander in off the street, browse innocently for a while, then slip a cashmere jumper under their jacket and stroll out again.
No, they come mob-handed, they steal to order, they swarm the shop and strip the shelves like locusts in a field of crops. If you doubt the colossal scale of the problem, this is what the Co-op’s director of public affairs, Paul Gerrard, told the Retail Gazette:-
“What is driving a 44 per cent increase [of crime in stores] is people who are stealing to order in huge volumes, people coming into our stores with wheelie bins, people coming into our stores with builders’ bags to steal the entire confectionery section, the entire spirit section, the entire meat section.”
My wife witnessed such a crime in Marks and Spencer just weeks ago. She noticed a man behaving suspiciously at the meat counter. He rifled through the steaks, putting one after another into his wire basket.
A couple of furtive glances later, he was legging it out the back door; though he needn’t have hurried, no one was coming after him.
My wife found an M&S assistant and reported what she had seen. “Oh, no, not again!” said the woman.
We are not talking about petty pilfering, this is plundering, looting – and they used to shoot people for that.
Primark boss George Weston recently told the Sun: “The cost of shoplifting is now bigger than our bill for rates.”
To put that into perspective, Primark pays about £70 million a year in business rates on 191 stores.
Weston said that shoplifting had become “socially acceptable” with the thieves “facing no consequences”.
He added: “We can put cameras in and tighten our security but at the end it is a societal issue, so the solution has to be one of policy.”
A raid last week on a house just off our High Road uncovered £6,000 worth of suspected stolen goods. A woman was arrested. But most theft goes unpunished.
The latest available figures from the British Retail Consortium suggest there were 45,750 incidents of shoplifting a day in the financial year 2023-24. There were 1,300 incidents against staff every day with 8,800 of those in the year resulting in injury.
Yet in the past year, police issued only 431 fixed penalty notices, police cautions have halved and prosecutions have fallen to 28,995 compared with 71,998 a decade ago.
So, while Yvette Cooper promises beefed up laws and more officers on patrol, what are the police planning? Cuts, that’s what.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told the London Policing Board his force will have to cut 2,300 officers and 400 staff this year because they have a £450 million hole in the budget.
He currently has 33,473 officers and 11,178 staff under his command. The family silver – our local police station, for example – has already been sold, so cuts are the last resort.
Meanwhile, the Mayor of London’s draft Police and Crime Plan for 2025-2029 is big on platitudes but barren on detail about how he will boost police resources.
But you can be sure the slippery Sir Sadiq Khan – and please don’t get me started on that – will use the criminal justice crisis to extract from us the maximum he is permitted to take in taxation while blaming someone else for his shortcomings.
As we all know, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. So you and I will continue to fork out the £1.8 billion that’s being trousered by foreign crime cartels.
*****
A more unlikely darts fan than Julia Hartley-Brewer, former political editor of this parish, is hard to imagine.
Yet I remember her returning from a trip to the world darts championships at Alexandra Palace with her husband – a northern lad, as I recall – blown away by the experience.
Great fun, she told Sunday Express colleagues. A blast. I must admit, I was dubious. Darts was something I did as a young man only when rain forced me and my teammates back into the cricket pavilion.
Even then I tried to avoid it as it showed up my pitiful inadequacy at subtraction.
But the triumph of Luke Littler, 17 going on 47, has helped me to understand the lure of “arrers”. It’s not like the other two niche pursuits that have turned into crazes in my lifetime: namely, snooker and dog racing.
The latter was fairly short-lived and involved a lot of Made In Chelsea types with names such as Jolyon and Jemima rubbing shoulders with geezers being fleeced by ferret-faced bookies at Catford or Hackney Wick stadiums.
They loved it. Experience real working class life. And bring your own champagne and canapes.
As for snooker, that was serious, for the cognoscenti. It was watched with hushed reverence. A smattering of applause would follow a shot played with sidespin to pot the black and bring the cueball back to disturb the pack of reds sufficiently to set up the next shot.
Most blokes have played a little. I played pool upstairs in the Crusader Club, hard by the vanway at the Daily Express building in Great Ancoats Street, Manchester, as beer oozed from the carpet and crept up the welts of my shoes. And later I played snooker in the relative luxury of the London Press Club.
But neither the dogs nor the snooker had the staying power of darts. Why? Well, because you couldn’t sit at a big table with your mates and a seven-pint jug of beer, dressed as Fred Flintstone, whooping and hollering as young Littler blotted it all out and nervelessly sent his dart spinning on its axis unerringly towards double 19.
It’s a party. And everyone loves a party.
*****
“I am blind , but I am able to read thanks to a wonderful new system known as broil. I’m sorry, I’ll just feel that again.” – Peter Cook
RICHARD DISMORE
7 January 2025
