What can we do about 'lawless Britain'?
The authorities seem complacent and helpless in the face of blatant criminality.
I hope you had a happy Easter. Someone who perhaps didn’t was security guard Walker Smith, who was controversially sacked by Waitrose, after 17 years of employment, for tackling a repeat-offending shoplifter trying to pilfer Lindt Gold Bunny Easter eggs. This came hot on the heels of high-profile shoplifting mobbing incidents that caused chaos in both London and Birmingham as the Easter holidays kicked off. Inspired by online ‘link-ups’ on TikTok and Snapchat, the marauding teens boasted of their successful lawlessness and posted videos of their antics on social media.
So the whole nation watched on aghast as swarming youth seemed to act with impunity, without police intervention. And oh, what an irony that our 54-year-old heroic thief-tackler worked in Waitrose in Clapham Junction branch in south London. It was elsewhere in Clapham that only days before witnessed youths terrifying shoppers by storming into Marks & Spencer on Clapham High Street – for two nights running – at one stage leading to families being locked in a shop to keep them safe.
This has all led to a debate over Easter about whether the corporate norm of ordering shop-staff not to intervene to tackle shoplifters, despite increasing numbers of retail thefts, is ridiculous and demoralising. How can this not equate to an open invitation to every thief in town? Doesn’t this teach the young the lesson that stealing from shops can happen without retribution?
One positive outcome is the number of people putting Waitrose under growing pressure to reinstate Walker Smith. The broadcaster Iain Dale said on his LBC radio show: ‘If any member of my staff had tackled a shoplifter like he [Smith] did, I would have wanted to give them a pay rise, not sack them… To me, he’s a hero, but to them he’s just nothing.’ The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, called on Waitrose to reinstate Smith, accusing the supermarket of acting ‘disgracefully’ and suggested that Smith should be paid a bonus ‘for his bravery and initiative… store staff and the public should be supported and encouraged to intervene… Otherwise, shoplifting will continue to surge unchecked.’ This article by Brendan O’Neill on spiked is worth a read on the topic.
These incidents come amid a rise in shoplifting, with offences increasing by five per cent in the year to September 2025, according to the latest figures. Research by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found 59 per cent of high-street small firms in London say increasing crime or anti-social behaviour poses a big risk to the high street, with some shopkeepers saying they are being targeted by thieves on a daily basis.
The government’s response has been suitably technocratic. Of course, it’s a no-brainer that Labour is repealing that daft immunity granted to shop theft of goods worth £200 or less. But how effective will this be if policing doesn’t respond accordingly or if security guards are prevented from intervening as the thefts take place?
I am more bemused than impressed by the much-vaunted law change that will create a standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker. However, as I argued in the Lords, it’s already a crime to assault ANYONE. How will this specific offence guarantee protection for retail staff, if policing is already inconsistent in how it deals with assault more generally?
But maybe a deeper question is what leads to such lawlessness, with so many citizens – especially younger generations – behaving with such contempt for law and order and so indifferent to a more pro-social attitude to communities. We discussed these issues at the past two Battle of Ideas festivals – both debates are worth listening to (see below).
Moreover, the attitude of political activists seems to have added to the erosion of respect for social norms. The Telegraph has revealed that ‘Tax the rich’ activists are planning to steal ‘essential items’ from luxury grocery stores and to ‘occupy’ shop floors of high-end supermarkets as part of a shoplifting crime spree between 20 April and 10 May. In preparation, Take Back Power has been running ‘non-violent direct action’ and ‘demystifying arrest’ training sessions at sites across the country, to recruit and prepare for its new campaign of shop thefts.
This politicised apologism for crime is well described by Austin Williams in his article for The Future Cities Project, which we reproduce with his permission below.
Listen to the debates
Lawless Britain?
Battle of Ideas festival 2025
From riots to shoplifting: dealing with lawlessness
Battle of Ideas festival 2024
Can Pay, Won’t Pay
Austin Williams
There is an interesting debate raging about the recent youth unrest in Clapham and Solihull, where gangs of teenagers – some masked – raided supermarkets, attacked staff and rampaged through the city streets in broad daylight.
In some instances, shoppers were allegedly locked in the premises for their own safety as hundreds of young people looted Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and McDonalds, seemingly with impunity. These and other stores in the vicinity were forced to close early to avoid being gutted. At the time of writing there have only been a few arrests, most notably six teenage girls, including two aged 13, who have been taken into custody for theft and assaulting an emergency worker.
Apparently, the trouble started at Clapham Common in south London, when around 300 young people raced across to the town centre and attempted to ransack the Marks & Spencer food hall. In-store and camera phone footage shows two or three police attempting to break things up. Later that day in Clapham, around 100 officers were called in to control the crowds.
The police issued a 36-hour dispersal order over large swathes of Solihull town centre to break up the possibility of a repeat of the actions of recent nights. The primary condition for being caught in the dispersal net is that the police might ‘suspect’ that a person ‘is likely to contribute’ to causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’. These orders, explicitly draconian in content, give the authorities the right to ban anyone from certain public areas at a stroke. While it might seem that this is necessary in this instance, the extension of banning orders – shunting people to other parts of the town – is taking the place of policing.
The Metropolitan police say that specialist officers are going through CCTV to identify offenders in a post-hoc exercise. It seems that stopping crime is less important than picking up some of the perpetrators afterwards, preferably using camera footage and ID-monitoring. The message is that you can wantonly pillage, rob and vandalise, but at least a few of you ought to be nervous about being arrested sometime in the future.
The common response to criminality seems to be more facial-recognition technology to catch people after the event. Sir Robert Peel’s policing principles began with the claim: ‘The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights.’ Sadly, nowadays, this often gives free rein for pre-crime supporters to demand that authorities pick people up without explanation.
What was the cause of this rampage? The Times’s journalists blamed parents, the Guardian newspaper and the BBC blamed social media and ‘online trends’, GB News blamed the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, while the Daily Mirror blamed ‘Easter holiday madness’. Journalist Fraser Nelson blamed truancy, while a chicken-shop owner on Clapham High Street reputedly said, ‘this is just what kids do; I’m not worried about it‘.
The cause is partly due to the collapse of law and order, where shoplifting is sometimes considered too petty to be worthy of police time. Admittedly, the Crime and Policing Bill 2026 aims to ‘remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less’, but no one seems to have told the youth of Clapham and Solihull. But everyone knows that while Parliament spends its time inventing ever more crimes, that the odds of being caught are slim, and the lack of prison spaces means that sentencing is a mere slap on the wrist.
The other side of the coin is that any distinction between anti-social behaviour and criminality has become blurred. Notwithstanding petty rule-breaking – where people increasingly cycle on pavements and disrespect civic authorities, for example – there is now a pervasive cultural trend that has legitimated, almost glorified, criminality.
When Mizzy, the young black irritant, uploaded videos to TikTok a few years ago showing him entering strangers’ homes, these were called ‘pranks‘ by the mainstream media. He was a lovable rogue to those people who would never have to encounter him. But his wayward disregard for public conventions and personal privacy, and his general amorality, were also symptomatic of our times.
For many years, Extinction Rebellion (ER) has taught society that it is okay to flaunt the highway code, block traffic and cause delay, costs and frustration to road users. The ER website explains how ‘we can turn the criminal justice process (from arrest to prosecution) into an opportunity to advance our strategic objectives’. But this was just the start of a crime trend that paid no heed to criminal law. And vice versa, much of the criminal law refused to see it as criminal.
The Palestine Action supporter who slashed a painting of Lord Balfour – part of Trinity College, Cambridge’s private collection – was never found and prosecuted, even though the attack was filmed and widely distributed. Indeed, the police called off their enquiries after 12 months. Other emboldened pro-Palestinian activists felt that they had carte blanche – indeed felt that they were morally justified – in smashing up a Scottish aerospace factory causing £1million of damage yet found not guilty of violent disorder.
A coffee shop in north London had graffiti daubed over its walls and its windows broken by antisemitic activists. Just Stop Oil smashed petrol pumps, and sprayed Stonehenge with orange paint. A protest group called Take Back Power has carried out several thefts – which it describes as ‘liberating boxes of food’ from supermarkets to supply local food banks. It operates in Exeter and Truro, hardly the urban badlands. The marginal rights group called ‘Animal Rising’ were given mere community orders after causing thousands of pounds worth of damage to foodstuffs in Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges. A number of environmentalists from Insulate Britain graffitied a magistrate’s court, while others poured paint over the road.
What message does all this send?
These are the normalisers of the crimewave. These are the people who think vandalism is okay, that it is almost a duty. These are the people that would imagine that civil disobedience trumps the democratic process. It overrides the legal process. These are the middle-class activists that have no financial worries about paying for things yet are happy to steal for thrills. They legitimate robbery as morally righteous, and yet are the first to cry foul when the oiks do it.
These are the people who believe they have an ethical duty to broadcast criminality through their cavalier contempt for society, business and public safety, but they will join the chorus of condemnation against the ordinary youngsters who are merely following in their footsteps. Mizzy was immoral. Greta Thunberg is moral.
If we want to clamp down on anti-social behaviour, the first thing to do would be to recognise it, stop glamourising it, and then penalise those with privilege carrying it out. They do not deserve immunity while we merely crack down on some inner-city yobs (although, they also deserve our contempt).
But the general disdain for social norms did not start on the streets of Clapham; it is a corrosive sentiment that has been pandered to by the establishment for many years. If we can start to deal with that, maybe then we can start to recreate a society that remembers where the acceptable boundaries of a civilised society are set.
Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project.
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