Why Britons can’t stop stealing

We were once known as a nation of shopkeepers. We are now a nation of shoplifters. As the Times reported last week, citing two recent reports from criminologists, ‘Britain is an increasingly dishonest society’, where ‘stealing from self-service supermarket check-outs has almost become a national sport.’

It didn’t need academics to tell us what we already know, what we’ve read repeatedly in the newspapers, and what we’ve seen before our very eyes: theft has become commonplace and normalised. But we should still ask ourselves why.

Many factors are at play. The long-term, steady retreat of the police from the streets, an allied decline in civic pride and trust in society, the (correct) belief among would-be criminals that they won’t be prosecuted, and the lockdowns of 2020-21, which lead to a rise in dysfunctional and antisocial behaviour. But one cannot discount another deceptively banal factor: the rise in self-service check-outs themselves.