Britain is no longer a civilised country

Telegraph

17-07-2025

Good news for Middle England, for the strivers, the parents clobbered by Labour's pointlessly vicious VAT raid, the millions dragged into higher tax bands: the Government is now blaming you for the rise in shoplifting, too. According to the policing and crime minister, it's the middle classes who are responsible for pushing up store prices. But let's be honest, Sainsbury's aren't tagging wine, steaks and cheese to deter accountants, solicitors and members of the Rotary Club.
If this laughable deflection is Labour's answer to the scourge of shop theft, I expect rates will continue to shoot through the roof. There were over half a million such incidents in England and Wales in 2024, a 20 per cent jump on the previous year. Nearly a quarter of Brits admit to having shoplifted at some point in their lives.
But it's not just the headline data which are unsettling. It's not even that the police are patently failing to create a remotely credible deterrent, with just one in six incidents resulting in a charge in 2024, down from nearly 30 per cent in 2016. Too much policing is now purely reactive – squad cars and vans packed with coppers twiddling their thumbs waiting for the adrenaline buzz of performative action rather than being on boring neighbourhood patrols.
No, what's truly alarming is our collective loss of morality when it comes to these supposedly 'low level' crimes. When YouGov polled Londoners about fare-dodging recently – an offence which, as with shoplifting, too many deem 'victimless ' – a third said the authorities shouldn't bother to clamp down if the money recouped doesn't cover the cost of enforcement. While the money is certainly important, is there no concern over the ethics of this behaviour?
Granted, none of us is perfect. But our social order is now collapsing before our eyes. In the past, the strongest barrier to crime has been a sense of community. We should abide by the law not only because of the threat of punishment, but because we can distinguish between right and wrong. Long ago, Adam Smith wrote of an 'impartial spectator' in our heads, who judges our behaviour and fears that, if caught, we will be shamed. Or Jiminy Cricket, if you prefer.
Conscious attempts during the Victorian era to civilise the country – with schools, churches, charities, even trade unions competing to impose respectability – eventually succeeded.
There was a sharp fall in violent offences during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; crime plunged to such low levels during the 1920s and 1930s that the government was able to close underutilised prisons. And yet a century later we are forced into implementing risky early release as a consequence of overcrowding. We now lack the space even to warehouse bad people who would probably, given squalid conditions across much of our estate, be made worse by the experience anyway.
How do we begin to explain what has happened to our country? Why did crime double between 1957 and 1967, and double again by 1977? During the Second World War, the men had been away, the children had run wild, and religious practice plummeted. Consider the shoplifter: the endeavour is almost entirely 'risk-free' if you believe there is no God to answer to. Antisocial behaviour soared in the second half of the 20th century, along with marriage breakdown. By 1991, a car was reported stolen on average once every minute across England and Wales. Aeroplanes made smuggling easier; computers created new kinds of offences. Then came unmonitored mass immigration, with roughly 12 per cent of our prison population now foreign nationals.
But we didn't just lose our personal moral infrastructure, we lost our leadership. There is no one at all to look up to now: everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury down seems to have feet of clay.
Take a ride on our ludicrously named Overground lines and you will see people hunched over their phones, paying no attention to fellow passengers, or speaking a dozen different languages. Keir Starmer tried to put into words this general sense of detachment and malaise with his 'island of strangers' intervention, only to say weeks later that he 'deeply regretted ' his hurty words. He's the Prime Minister of a country which once ruled half the globe, for heaven's sake, yet he instantly capitulated in the face of gentle criticism from his halfwitted backbenchers and self-righteous quangocrats. It would be difficult to imagine Margaret Thatcher, Harold Macmillan or even Harold Wilson displaying such pitiful spinelessness.
Only when it fits into the woke agenda do we, as a society, display some pastiche of morality. When Netflix releases a documentary which hands politicians carte blanche to pillory the 'big tech' firms they've always loathed. When Met Chief Mark Rowley declares it ' shameful' that black boys in London are more likely to be dead by 18 than white boys, without mentioning that black youths are hugely over-represented amongst killers too. Or when the minister in charge of our policing spots an opportunity to blame middle class shoppers for the fact that losses from customer theft have reached a record £2.2 billion in a single year.