The broken society
Of course the declining economic environment is preoccupying people, but so is crime. The Government keeps telling us that overall crime has fallen sharply, but the terrible level of violent crime deeply shocks British people.
Yesterday Conservative Business Relations hosted a discussion for sixty key people from our increasingly beleaguered retail community. What we heard was so shocking. Group 4 Securicor told us that their vans are held up on average three times a day. The founder of Iceland Foods quoted some devastating statistics in respect of his stores – in the last six weeks there have been over 3,000 attempts at shoplifting, 66 violent attacks on staff and seven staff members’ cars were damaged and there is gun or knife related crime every two weeks. It is a breathtaking indictment of contemporary British society. The British Retail Consortium told us that in the latest retail crime survey, in one year violent acts against staff were up by 50% and threats of violence against staff had doubled.
It is a huge and unmeasured cost to business. It puts in context Gordon Brown’s comments about wasting food. What is also true about this yet another example of the fractured nature of our society is that the level of retail criminality is much greater than in the rest of Europe.
There is indeed a difference between right and wrong. Stealing, violent and verbal abuse against retail staff is simply wrong. There can simply be no excuses for this behaviour.
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime……….. oh yeah.