It’s a long-standing and cherished belief of left-liberals that most theft is caused by poverty and desperation, and that a rise in prices will necessarily lead to a rise in stealing by the poor and needy. It’s a shibboleth wheeled out every time this country faces a recession, cost of living crisis or feels the fallout from wars abroad. What’s less candidly admitted is that people will always use these crises as a pretext to steal for reasons that are age-old and less forgivable: because they are immoral and because they are greedy.
People will always use these crises as a pretext to steal for reasons that are age-old and less forgivable
There has been a surge in fuel theft at forecourts since the US-Iran war, according to a report in the Times this weekend. Data from 500 filling stations in the UK shows that the value of daily thefts has risen by 27 per cent since the conflict began in February.
Given that the epidemic of shoplifting has already become this year’s established news theme, this is not shocking to read. What might be surprising to hear is that many of the perpetrators aren’t poor or needy at all.
According to Forecourt Eye, a platform which helps filling stations recover debts, there are two categories of thieves now partly responsible for this surge: organised crime groups and those driving expensive cars such as Mercedes and Ferraris.
‘With someone taking fuel you think that’d you’d have a vision of what they look like but they aren’t what you think. They are driving supercars,’ says Michelle Henchoz, managing director of Forecourt Eye. She also notes ‘a clear increase in first-time offenders’ and proliferation of organised crime groups turning up in vans, opening their sliding doors and ‘filling up big canisters in the back of the van and either driving off or saying they’ve got no money.’ Significantly, she says that things weren’t nearly as bad during the fuel energy crisis of 2022, which suggests that there’s been a rapid degradation in our collective moral framework in the past four years.
Henchoz is not the only one to have observed that thieves today don’t consistently fit the stereotype of the deserving unfortunate. As Goran Raven, whose family has run a filling station in Essex for almost half a century, told the Times: ‘You’ll see everything from a crappy Fiesta going to a Ferrari. It really depends. The people who do it are brazen. They don’t worry about covering up their faces, they will even wave at cashiers.’
What we’ve been witnessing in recent years is not so much an undeclared, slow-motion class war but the unravelling of the social contract in a country that has lost its moral bearing. Starkly put, people don’t think stealing is wrong anymore. This wholesale shift traverses class boundaries, as can be garnered by the normalisation of shoplifting among the middle-classes, some of whom will now openly boast at having pilfered a supplementary item from supermarkets because it’s is a ‘victimless crime’, because they feel entitled to do so on account of being a loyal customer, or because stealing from large stores represents an act of ‘anti-capitalist’ resistance.
As easy as it is to issue platitudes about ‘poverty’ and ‘root causes’, what properly underpins our current crisis is the withering of stigma and shame in society, of essential taboos which in multitudinous manifestations have been inherent to all cultures in all places and at all times. According to research carried out by the Grocer last year, 37 per cent of those polled admitted to using self-checkouts to steal, a statistic even more alarming than it appears at first sight. This is the percentage that have no shame in openly admitting what they have done. It tells us nothing about the remaining proportion who pilfer in this way but retain a modicum of embarrassment at having done so.
Not only have taboos receded but so has the willingness and ability of the state to punish law-breakers. We are seeing a new generation of brazen thieves because they rightly calculate that their chances of being prosecuted or even collared have vastly decreased. Many people steal today not because they have to, but because they know they can. Hence, as also reported in recent days, the inordinate rise in thefts from churches. Libertine individuals and organised crime gangs aren’t filching historic silverware in the form of chalices, communion flagons and communion plates because they are hungry and homeless. They are doing so out of a sense of impunity, and because they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The notion that theft is the result of poverty is not only insulting to the working class, most of whom don’t become thieves out of socio-economic circumstances, it’s also naïve about the insatiable greed of some rich people. They also have the capacity to be bad people, and they, like us all, should be judged and condemned accordingly.
Comments