Can Pay, Won’t Pay
by Austin Williams
There is an interesting debate raging about the recent youth unrest in Clapham and Solihull, where gangs of teenagers – some masked –raided supermarkets, attacked staff, and rampaged through the city streets in broad daylight.
In some instances, shoppers were allegedly locked in the premises for their own safety as hundreds of young people looted Marks and Spencer, Waitrose and McDonalds, seemingly with impunity. A number of these and other stores in the vicinity were forced to close early to avoid being gutted. At the time of writing there have only been a few arrests, most notably six teenage girls, including two aged 13, who have been taken into custody for theft and assaulting an emergency worker.
Apparently the trouble started at Clapham Common in south London, when around 300 young people raced across to the town centre and attempted to ransack the Marks and Spencer’s food hall. In-store and camera phone footage shows two or three police attempting to break things up. Later that day in Clapham, around 100 officers were called in to control the crowds.
The police have issued a 36-hour dispersal order over large swathes of Solihull town centre to break up the possibility of a repeat of the actions of the last few nights. The primary condition for being caught in the dispersal net is that the police might “suspect” that a person “is likely to contribute” to causing “harassment, alarm or distress”. These orders, explicitly draconian in content, give the authorities the right to ban anyone from certain public areas at a stroke. While it might seem that this is necessary in this instance, the extension of banning orders – shunting people to other parts of the town – is taking the place of policing.
The Metropolitan police say that specialist officers are going through CCTV to identify offenders in a post-hoc exercise. It seems that stopping crime is less important than picking up some of the perpetrators afterwards, preferably using camera footage and ID-monitoring. The message is that you can wantonly pillage, rob and vandalise, but at least a few of you ought to be nervous about being arrested sometime in the future.
The common response to criminality seems to be more facial recognition technology to catch people after the event. Sir Robert Peel’s policing principles began with the claim that “The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals. If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights.” Sadly, nowadays, this often gives free rein for pre-crime supporters to demand that authorities pick people up without explanation.
What was the cause of this rampage? The Times’ journalists blamed parents, The Guardian newspaper and the BBC blamed social-media and “online trends”, GBNews blamed the mayor, while the Daily Mirror blamed “Easter holiday madness”. Journalist, Fraser Nelson blamed truancy, while a chicken shop owner on Clapham High Street reputedly said, “this is just what kids do; I’m not worried about it”
The cause is partly due to the collapse of law and order, where shoplifting is sometimes considered too petty to be worthy of police time. Admittedly, the Crime and Policing Bill 2026 aims to “remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less”, but no-one seems to have told the youth of Clapham and Solihull. But everyone knows that while Parliament spends its time inventing ever more crimes, that the odds of being caught are slim, and the lack of prison spaces means that sentencing is a mere slap on the wrist.
The other side of the coin is that any distinction between anti-social behaviour and criminality have become blurred. Notwithstanding petty rule breaking – where people increasingly cycle on pavements and disrespect civic authorities, for example – there is now a pervasive cultural trend that has legitimated, almost glorified, criminality.
When Mizzy, the young black irritant, uploaded videos onto TikTok a few years ago showing him entering strangers’ homes, these were called ‘pranks‘ by the mainstream media. He was a lovable rogue to those people who would never have to encounter him. But his wayward disregard for public conventions and personal privacy, and his general amorality was also symptomatic of our times.
For many years, Extinction Rebellion has taught society that it is OK to flout the highway code, block traffic and cause delay, costs, and frustraation to road users. Its website explains how “we can turn the criminal justice process (from arrest to prosecution) into an opportunity to advance our strategic objectives”. But this was just the start of crime trend that paid no heed to criminal law. And vice vrsa, much of the criminal law refused to see it as criminal.
The Palestine Action supporter who slashed a painting of Lord Balfour as part of Trinity College, Cambridge’s private collection – even though it was filmed and widely distributed – was never found and prosecuted. Indeed, the police called off their enquiries after 12 months. Other emboldened pro-Palestinian activists felt that they had carte blanche – indeed felt that they were morally justified – in smashing up a Scottish aerospace factory causing £1million of damage yet found not guilty of violent disorder.
A coffee shop in north London had graffiti daubed over its walls and its windows broken by anti-Semitic activists. Just Stop Oil smashed petrol pumps, and sprayed Stonehenge with orange paint. A protest group called Take Back Power has carried out several thefts – which it describes as “liberating boxes of food” -from supermarkets to supply local food banks. It operates in Exeter and Truro, hardly the urban Badlands. The marginal rights group called ‘Animal Rising’ were given mere community orders after causing thousands of pounds-worth of damage to foodstuffs in Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges. A number of environmentalists from Insulate Britain graffitied a magistrate’s court, while others poured paint over the road. What message does all this send?
These are the normalisers of the crimewave. These are the people who think vandalism is OK… that it is almost a duty. These are the people that would imagine that civil disobedience trumps the democratic process. It overrides the legal process. These are the middle-class activists that have no financial worries about paying for things yet are happy to steal for thrills; to legitimate robbery as morally righteous, and yet are the first to cry foul when the oiks do it.
These are the people who believe they have an ethical duty to broadcast criminality through their cavalier contempt for society, business and public safety, but they will join the chorus of condemnation against the ordinary youngsters who are merely following in their footsteps. Mizzy was immoral. Greta Thumberg is moral.
If we want to clamp down on anti-social behaviour, the first thing to do would be to recognise it, stop glamourising it, and then penalise those with privilege carrying it out. They do not deserve immunity while we merely crack down on some inner-city yobs (although, they too, deserve our contempt). But the general disdain for social norms did not start on the streets of Clapham; it is a corrosive sentiment that has been pandered to by the establishment for many years. If we can start to deal with that, maybe then we can start to recreate a society that remembers where the acceptable boundaries of a civilised society are set.
.
