Sacked for tackling a shoplifter? Britain is so lost right now

Imagine a country where those who apprehend thieves are punished more harshly than the thieves themselves. Where the one who gets shamed and shunned is not the workless bum on a stealing spree but the decent bloke who stands in his way. It sounds like some dystopic fantasy where morality has been turned on its head and crime decriminalised. But it’s real. The country you’re imagining is Britain.

The story of the Waitrose employee getting the heave-ho for blocking the path of a light-fingered crook has shocked everyone. Even the Guardian, which normally pooh-poohs such stories as right-wing fare designed to get ‘the gammon’ even more red-faced than usual, has given it half a page. Things must be bad. His name is Walker Smith, he’s 54, he had worked at Waitrose for 17 years, and he was let go for stopping a shoplifter from pilfering some Easter eggs. Sacked for thwarting crime – this is where we’re at, fellow Britons.

He was an assistant at the Waitrose in Clapham Junction in south London. Quick question: what’s going on in Clapham? First, mobs of idle youths terrify shoppers for two nights straight as useless coppers look on in bewilderment. Now a man loses his job for saving property from the clutches of a tea-leaf. The pilferer was trying to make off with a bag-full of expensive Lindt Gold Bunny Easter eggs. But Mr Smith had other ideas. He grabbed the bag of booty, a small tussle ensued, and the shoplifter scarpered empty-handed. Promotion for Mr Smith? Nope. He was reprimanded.

The details are mad. Smith says he recognised the shoplifter as a repeat offender. And he wasn’t going to let him get those choco bunnies for free. So he yanked the bag, it broke, and the bunnies crashed to the floor, one of them breaking into pieces. Smith says he picked up one of the slivers of chocolate and out of frustration threw it towards some shopping trolleys, ‘not aiming it at the shoplifter’. He was told off by his manager (?) but that wasn’t the end of it: it was pushed upstairs to that most deathly of bureaucracies – HR.

He was hauled in for a meeting with two store managers. He begged for his job – ‘Waitrose is like my family’, he said – but to no avail. He was told that he had broken the rules, one of which is that shop staff must not tackle shoplifters. Can the managerial classes hear themselves? Do they not know how insane this sounds? Forbidding retail staff from confronting thieves is like telling a lollipop lady she’s not allowed to smile at children. It’s crazy officious bollocks.

Of course it’s all about ‘health and safety’. In its statement on Smith’s case, Waitrose said all employees are told not to be have-a-go heroes, because ‘nothing we sell is worth risking lives for’. What a ruthless weaponisation of fear: never do anything good because you might die. It sums up how thoroughly anti-social nonchalance has been institutionalised in modern Britain. From terror attacks to bad behaviour on buses to theft in shops, the cry of the boss class and political class is the same every time: Don’t do anything. Just go home. It’s not worth it.

We have decommissioned heroism. We have made it tantamount to a crime – or at least a sackable offence – to feel a sense of social responsibility. Self-preservation has become the most celebrated virtue. You don’t have to be a sociologist to see how savagely such fretful hyper-individualism tears at the social fabric. A society where shop assistants are taught to let shoplifting happen, where Tube workers watch as entitled shits leap the barriers, and where even police and medical staff hold back from the site of terror attacks until a risk assessment has been carried out, is a society in name only. Our ‘betters’ have birthed a post-social hellscape where standing up for your fellow citizens is now seen as the maddest thing you can do. Won’t you think of yourself!

Yes, confronting a thief or telling anti-social arseholes to behave themselves is risky. It has consequences we cannot always predict. But you know what else has consequences? This ceaseless discouragement of bravery. It alienates us from one another. It tells us other people aren’t worth the effort. It elevates the self over the citizenry. And it green-lights crime. Today’s virtual decriminalisation of shoplifting and fare-dodging and phone-snatching – not to mention bike theft and even burglary, crimes that are rarely solved – emboldens the lowlifes who want to make the most dishonest of livings. We aren’t safer by being dutifully anti-social – quite the opposite.

Imagine the managerial classes pissing their pants over some shattered Easter eggs and never clocking the social wreckage left by their own celebration of cowardice as a virtue. In breaking Waitrose’s rules, Mr Smith broke this post-social ethos too, and reminded us that having a go is often far better than covering your own back. Good on him. He should be reinstated. And so should that old ideal of looking out for other people.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.