The most offensive thing about shoplifting isn’t the word ‘scumbag’

It takes a particular kind of brass neck to walk into someone else’s shop, past the carefully arranged displays, past the person who opened up early that morning, and help yourself to their livelihood. No payment. No thanks. Just a pocket full of stolen goods and the quiet confidence that you’ll probably get away with it.

And in the twenty seconds it has taken you to read this, another shoplifter will have done exactly that. In each minute the shops are open, there are nearly three thefts.

Rob Davies, who runs the Run Ragged vintage shop in Wrexham, caught five of them over the past year. After the first, he called the police – they handed the stolen shirt back and let the shoplifter go. After losing nearly £200 worth of stock, he locked away his higher-value items and put up a blunt – but, I’d say, restrained given the context – notice: “Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.”

Davies didn’t bother reporting the other thefts. He assumed they’d do nothing. In that, he was wrong – not about the thefts, but about the police’s involvement. Local officers took aim at his notice, suggesting it “could be seen as provocative and offensive”. Not the shoplifting – the sign condemning it.

Only after a minor media storm did North Wales Police clarify that yes, it is still legal to call thieves “scumbags”. One wonders why such clarification was needed.

According to Downing Street, however, Sir Keir Starmer wouldn’t use the term. It’s a word some in Labour haven’t previously shied away from – Angela Rayner once proudly called the Tories “scum” – but it seems harder for them to direct it towards actual criminals.

If a person who has done something “dishonest or unacceptable” is the definition of scumbag, then the label fits perfectly. Robert Jenrick says he’d call shoplifters worse, and I’d be tempted to join him.

Because shoplifting is not just theft. It is an assault on fairness in British life: you earn what you have, you play by the rules, and the rules protect those who follow them. The shoplifter smashes that quiet covenant, knowing the system will sidestep the mess they’ve made rather than confront them.

And they are often serial offenders – like Kevin Greenwood, with 49 convictions, over 150 offences, and unpaid court fines of more than £8,000 – who laugh at the lack of consequence. Greenwood’s latest punishment? A conditional discharge and £51 in fines. He won’t pay those either.

The problem is not the word. It is the reality. Shoplifting is at record highs: 530,643 offences were reported in the year to March – a 20 per cent rise on the year before. Those are only the cases we hear about. The British Retail Consortium estimates 50,000 incidents a day go unreported because shopkeepers – like Davies at Run Ragged – know nothing will be done. Only 2.5 per cent of these offences are recorded by the police each year. The chances of arrest and prison? Unbelievably unlikely. In 270,000 cases last year, no suspect was identified by the police. 

Walk around Waitrose and you’ll see signs reading: “SHOPLIFTING HAS A PRICE – You could be arrested, jailed or fined.” You could be. You should be. But you won’t be.

Part of the reason is legislative. Since changes brought in under the last Labour government – and kept by the coalition – stealing goods worth under £200 rarely leads to arrest. The fine, if there is one, is often £90 – less than the value of what was taken. It is cheaper to steal than to buy. Penalties for driving in a bus lane or littering are higher.

The other reason is cultural. The Information Commissioner’s Office warns that putting up pictures of shoplifters “may not be appropriate” because it might breach their privacy under GDPR. Privacy! The thief’s privacy is guarded more jealously than the victim’s property.

No wonder some shops now keep their doors locked. Down my own high street – a leafy part of North West London – one store after another reports shelves swept clean and now buzzes to allow customers inside. To buy vitamins, I have to get someone to unlock the door.

The rot is not only in the scale of the crime but in the inversion of justice: the law-abiding citizen is told to pay up, watch their language, hide the faces of those who rob them, and accept that “low-value theft” is not worth the state’s time. The law-abiding person is unprotected from the lawless one. 

The Government’s Sentencing Review will effectively get rid of the prison sentences that were there for shoplifters. Of the 11,000 who received a sentence of less than a year for shop theft, they’d almost all go free.

And yet, the police find time to caution shop owners about the words they use to describe these criminals. Don’t you feel safer already?