I’ve never had much time for people who argue that shoplifting is a victim-free endeavour/ only taking from multimillionaire corporate bosses/ the poor struggling to feed themselves. For a start, many small businesses have gone under or are struggling because of the endemic of cowardly theft - because that’s what it is; shoplifters know they won’t face physical defiance - from shops in the last few years. Secondly, we know that many of these light-fingered individuals are working in gangs that turn over tens of thousands a week. Thirdly, these are not generally people in need: for every homeless person taking a loaf of bread there are ten well-fed individuals in smart, often expensive clothes, piling the most expensive goods they can into a trolley before legging it. If challenged by security staff, they ignore them and ram the trolley through the door, or sometimes even resort to violence. Security guards on low wages risk their lives if they obstruct a thug carrying a knife. Finally, the big chains recoup any losses through shoplifting by raising prices for honest customers.
I was not, therefore, sympathetic to professional vandal Arthur Clifton (he carried out an estimated £21,000 of damage to University College London, for which he was prosecuted and found guilty), when he announced this week that in March, there will be a free-for-all of theft from Waitrose and M&S Foods. Clifton, spokesperson for activist group Take Back Power, styled this planned raid as a ‘redistribution’, a ‘take back’ from shops and giving to those in need in the community.
‘Take-back’? That implies that one has given in the past. The only thing these tiresome dolts have given anyone is a laugh at how irrational their politics are, despite an expensive education. They’ve also given hours and hours of tedious manual work to those on minimal wage charged with clearing up their spoilt brat mess.
Clifton would be laughed out of any socialist group if he tried to style himself as one of those in need in the community. He is a well-fed, well- dressed, strident ex student from Bristol University who, in his mid twenties, has still not bothered to get a proper job. He has the kind of entitlement seen only in the attention-seeking comfortably off. Clifton has crowed about the plan, which he envisages seeing 50-100 people throng each of many food shops at once and ‘clear it out.’
I wonder if he has considered the thousands of working class people on low wages toiling in said food stores who will be tasked with controlling these smirking halfwits? Check out staff, security staff, shelf stackers, and so on. In addition, as people on minimum wage in supermarkets up and down the country know, the sole perk of such a job is first dibs at sell-by that day food remaining on the shelves when the shop is closing. How will the supermarket staff feel about their days becoming not only grimly stressful dealing with great crowds of cheering thieves but also devoid of their only perk of bargain food because of the blatant, shameless crimes of the privileged underemployed?
In any case, how do the group plan on distributing the food to those ‘in need’ in the community? How many takers will they have for a soggy sandwich crammed next to the sweaty groin of an unwashed zealot in his jeans pocket? Or a packet of sushi swiped hours before and crushed in a rucksack together with a month’s worth of dirty laundry being taken home for Mama to wash? Can you see disabled pensioners in need hobbling with zimmers to the city centre for a ready meal? Or a single mother venturing out with her baby in a pram in filthy weather to beg for a packet of apples?
Take Back Power are a splinter group from Just Stop Oil, another bunch of activists whose antics have caused those in need to suffer in the past. Anyone needing an ambulance to take them to hospital for an emergency condition while hordes of dim scruffs blocked many major roads and bridges in London will have known that they were dicing with death because of the long delays in reaching hospital. As a disabled person myself, I had to take a three hour detour to get home from the British Museum because tube stations and roads were shut. Emma Thompson flew to London and back first class from the US to show her support for, er, cutting down on the use of oil. That’s how rational these people are. All shrieked words and inconsideration of ordinary people but no constructive action or viable plans.
Last month, Take Back Power poured custard and crumble on the display case housing some of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Apart from being a shocking waste of crumble (though mine’s a butter-free one without custard), this was such an inane act as well as being something that would cause disgust at those who’ve grown out of toddlerhood. Who do they think would have to clean up the mess? No, not the King and Queen, but some flunkeys on minimal wage having to get down on their hands and knees. Take Back Power are causing the very people they profess to want to help to take the knee - not in solidarity but the hands and knees, scrubbing floors of their mess.
Just before this wacky trick, the group carried out the clever and constructive process of dumping bags of manure under the Christmas tree at the Ritz, for the poorly paid doormen and porters to sort out in the freezing cold.
M&S and Waitrose might do well to obtain their own sacks of manure, and pelt these arrogant faux do-gooders as they leave, after they’ve raided their premises. But, when the shops are left as if stripped by a plague of locusts, I can bet which side - harassed staff on next to minimal wages or trustafarian under-employed Oxbridge rejects given a taste of their own excrement medicine - will play the victim, blubbering plaintively to Mama and Papa.
