DOMINIC LAWSON: Why do not we cease the epidemic of violent shoplifting?

Who, at least in financial terms, were the biggest victims of the rioting that took place in our towns and cities just over a week ago? It was those people at the heart of our communities who always lose most when this happens: our shopkeepers.

It is our shopkeepers – small family businesses in many cases – who suffer the terror of looting.

Thus it was that across the nation, ahead of last Wednesday’s anticipated resumption of anti-immigrant riots – which spurred 41 of our regional police forces to gather in force on the High Streets – many thousands of shops were pre-emptively boarded up.

But, beyond a mere handful, the would-be rioters never showed up. Instead, there were thousands of anti-racist campaigners, carrying placards.

Many declared exultantly that it was they who’d ‘scared off’ those designated ‘far-Right extremists’. And a former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Neil Basu, told the BBC that ‘the anti-racist protesters effectively shamed them off the streets’.

Really? Are those hooligans endowed with a great sense of shame? I don’t think so. Neither do they strike me as averse to a punch-up on the streets.

No, the reason they didn’t show up for a repeat performance, either then or at the weekend, is that the first of their number had already been sentenced to a stretch at His Majesty’s pleasure: Derek Drummond, given three years for violent disorder and attacking a policeman in Southport. This was a man with 14 previous convictions.

Others quickly followed, and the judiciary took the unusual step of releasing film of the judges passing sentence.

According to the Met, of the most violent men arrested during the rioting in Whitehall, around 70 per cent have criminal backgrounds. This is unsurprising and familiar. Familiar, that is, from the London riots in August 2011, in which an estimated 2,500 mostly small family retail businesses were hit by looting and arson.

Those riots followed the shooting dead by the police of Mark Duggan, a member of a street gang called Tottenham Man Dem. Around three quarters of the more than 3,000 people arrested then had criminal records.

Then, too, the courts acted in the opposite way to the normally glacial progress: they were kept open round the clock, and after five days of condign sentencing (one youngster with ‘no previous’ was given six months in the slammer for nicking a case of bottled water from a supermarket), the rioting abruptly stopped.

Sir Keir Starmer was then the Director of Public Prosecutions who authorised this instant justice. Afterwards, he observed: ‘I think people gamble on: ‘Am I going to get caught? Am I going to get sentenced and sent to prison?’

‘And if the answer is ‘I’m watching on television some other people who had been caught 24 or 48 hours after they were on the streets with us’, I think that’s a very powerful message.’

Indeed it is: now, as it was in 2011.

But it is the opposite message to that which the police – who held the line so bravely against the rioters – send to the nation’s shopkeepers at any other time.

This was shockingly exposed by the Mail’s Guy Adams in his report from Chiswick High Street, which is one of London’s most pleasant shopping areas (or at least it was).

Adams interviewed several of the shop owners left enraged by the Met’s apparent insouciance during a campaign of gangs stripping stores of valuable produce at will. Many of the shops had, as a result, boarded up – for good.

The manager of the fashion boutique Riccado, a family business which had opened on Chiswick High Street 30 years ago, told Adams how, in February, one of these gangs had ransacked the shop and carried off clothing worth at least £25,000.

Called that evening by a traumatised assistant, the manager next morning reported the incident to the police, telling them that she had CCTV footage showing the faces of some of the gang, and that as they weren’t wearing gloves, there would be fingerprints.

The police never came round … until eight days later, when the manager (who didn’t want her name to be published, out of fear of reprisals) handed over the CCTV footage.

Next day, she was told by the police: ‘It is unlikely we will be able to identify those responsible. We have therefore closed the case.’

No wonder, as Adams reported, that ‘barely a day goes by without a fresh report of some feral gang striding into a local store and casually making off with thousands of pounds worth of stock. CCTV of their heists, including dozens of films obtained by the Daily Mail, show how they combine menace with staggering impunity’.

Last month, the Daily Telegraph produced a similar report, from Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex, where demoralised small shop owners described a situation of ‘lawlessness’, with the town having the joint highest crime rate, relative to the population, in the whole country, and the proportion of shoplifting offences unsolved in the town centre and beach areas at 97.6 per cent.

An antiques shop owner, Nigel Wareham, told the paper: ‘Nothing gets done. Police don’t come out. We had three break-ins on this road this week alone.’ Not surprisingly, shops are boarding up … and a community dies a bit more.

The biggest companies have the resources to act when the police won’t. In May, Marks & Spencer became the first to get a prolific offender jailed with the help of a private investigation and prosecutions company: TM Eye.

The thief, David Hanson, broke into an M&S store in Streatham Hill, by smashing a glass window, and grabbed £500 worth of produce. It was all on CCTV. The manager called the police … but nothing doing. (The chairman of M&S, Archie Norman, remarked that retailers ‘have to accept that the police aren’t interested’ in tackling shoplifting.)

As a result of the private prosecution, Hanson was jailed for a year for five offences, including one assault on an M&S employee.

What is the new Government doing about the fact that violent and abusive attacks on shopkeepers rose by 50 per cent in 2022-2023, while police failed even to show up on the scene of 40 per cent of violent shoplifting incidents?

In the King’s Speech, it was announced that assault on shop workers would be made a specific criminal offence. This was something Rishi Sunak had set in train before the election scuppered that legislation. The Conservative proposal specified a maximum sentence of six months. Big deal. Let’s see if Labour can do better.

But even if they propose a more stringent penalty, what is the point if the police take the view that theft, abuse, casual violence and even the loss of livelihood is the occupational hazard of being a shopkeeper?

Let those we quaintly call the ‘forces of law and order’ show the same intolerance for this as they rightly do when racist rioters lay waste to our High Streets.