Nice Britain Is Not So Nice Anymore

Final week, I visited my favorite cafe in South London, identified for its Illy espresso beans that I relish. As I savoured my espresso, a younger man, carrying a sleeveless hoodie and shorts, casually walked in. He was carrying a hold-all bag, and I believed he had simply come from the health club. However he had different plans. Within the blink of a watch, he swept each final sandwich into his bag from a stocked shelf. As he walked previous me, our eyes met. I considered confronting him however as an alternative took one other sip of my espresso and pretended to be engrossed in my smartphone. The lone waiter and the supervisor behind the counter appeared helpless or maybe paralysed with concern. The boy walked out as if he had are available in for his day by day grocery procuring.

I turned to the supervisor, nonetheless tucked safely behind his counter, and requested whether or not he would report the incident to the police. Nonetheless shaken, he gave me a weary smile and mentioned there was no level calling the police. He defined that shoplifting beneath £200 was not price reporting. In actual fact, a 2014 legislation had categorised shoplifting as a “low-value” crime, inviting minimal or no punishment.

London is a paradise for shoplifters. Nevertheless it’s not the one one. Shoplifting circumstances are spiralling uncontrolled throughout the UK. In response to the Workplace for Nationwide Statistics, final yr was the worst on report for shoplifting, with police recording 4,30,000 offences. The retailers’ physique, the British Retail Consortium, says these figures are a fraction of the particular incidents, a lot of which aren’t reported for concern of violence. The physique believes the circumstances crossed 8 million final yr, with retailers dropping over £1.8 billion.

A Damaged Britain

Far-right politicians declare, with out a lot proof, that shoplifting is a pastime of ‘unlawful’ immigrants. That they exist outdoors the system and due to this fact escape scrutiny. These politicians lament the truth that the nation’s assets are being overwhelmed as large quantities of cash are being spent on housing and feeding immigrants.

Nonetheless, human rights activists and group employees imagine the alarming rise in shoplifting is linked to a grave value of residing disaster. Brexit after which the Covid-19 pandemic led to an upswing in unemployment and pushed scores of communities under the poverty line. There are quite a few studies that declare that a lot of Britain’s woes are because of its breaking free from the European Union and its incapability to cope with the devastating pandemic.

“We Have not Received Meals Tonight. Can You Assist?”

Poverty has affected many disadvantaged communities and pushed them right into a state of affairs the place they’ve turn into depending on meals charities. A current report by Bristol College cited a pupil’s letter to his college, saying, “We’ve not obtained any meals tonight. Please are you able to assist?” The college analysis, specializing in meals charity in faculties, revealed that there are over 4,000 school-based meals banks in main and secondary faculties throughout England. That is along with varied charities – together with some run by Indian Sikhs – that run meals banks each in faculties and at different locations.

Nice Britain is manifestly changing into poorer. Even for an informal customer to the nation, it is arduous to overlook its bloated underbelly. A few years in the past, a White colleague visiting Mumbai from London was shocked to see scores of homeless individuals sleeping beneath flyovers and on footpaths. She instructed me she was genuinely moved by the squalor. London’s homeless could also be fewer in quantity than India’s, however they’re ubiquitous. 

A Deeply Unequal Society

The decline is seen in all places. Wherever you go in London – and even different massive cities in Britain – you can’t miss homeless individuals alongside the excessive streets and open public areas. They sleep or relaxation in beds manufactured from cardboard and tattered blankets. They take refuge beneath railway bridges and public parks, the place benches function their beds. They appear fatigued and misplaced.

Regardless of its wealth, London has pockets of extreme poverty and deprivation. Little one poverty charges are greater in London than in another English area. London’s crime charges are greater than another main European cities, with rising issues about knife assaults, gang violence and terrorism.

Beneath London’s gleaming floor lies social inequalities, financial woes, and excessive poverty that kind the town’s darkish netherworld. The wealth hole between the wealthy and the poor is staggering, with the highest 10% of earners holding 30% of the town’s earnings.

Historic perspective

Although it wasn’t all the time like this, London, and far of England, has been by a cycle of decay and regeneration. A really impressionable younger Trinidadian author, CLR James, visited England in 1932. His portrayal of London within the Thirties in Letter from London might be true of at this time’s time as nicely. “I noticed London with new eyes; I noticed the huge multitudes toiling to make just a few rich; I noticed the wealthy with their cash, their assets, their million servants, exploiting the nice, blind, unconscious lots of the poor,” he noticed in one in all his essays. In one other place, he captured his uneasy feeling thus, “I really feel each a stranger and a prisoner, trapped in a society that’s detached to the struggling of the bulk and obsessive about its personal decline.”

At this time, too, very similar to within the Thirties, many right here have began complaining that Britain is damaged. Its financial system is stagnating, its politics is divisive, and its society is in disarray. Really, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been saying for a very long time that the UK’s “financial system is damaged, the well being service is damaged, and public service is damaged”. His Labour Celebration was voted to energy within the July election on its promise of fixing a “damaged Britain”.

India Is Marching Forward

It is true that the British financial system has been stagnating for years. However the nation was far forward of India in 2014, which was the world’s tenth largest financial system on the time. Over time, nonetheless, India grew steadily. In 2021, it left the UK behind and have become the fifth-largest financial system on the earth. The Indian authorities’s financial insurance policies stand in sharp distinction to the lacklustre imaginative and prescient of successive British governments over 15 years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities ensured that India had political and financial stability and continuity. Britain was not that fortunate, seeing six completely different governments led by six completely different prime ministers in the identical interval.

After being voted to energy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer mentioned he had “numerous mess to repair”, blaming the outgoing Tory authorities that had been in energy from 2010 to 2024 for main the nation right here. As historian Niall Ferguson notes, “The UK’s decline is a long-term course of, pushed by a mixture of things, together with financial mismanagement, social inequality, and political polarisation”.

As a primary step in direction of “fixing the mess”, Starmer has proposed to boost taxes. However that’s more likely to be seen as a betrayal as a result of the get together had promised to not improve taxation. The Prime Minister has even warned that the forthcoming price range is “going to be painful”. It is going to worsen, he mentioned, earlier than it will get higher.

Whereas the talk rages on within the media, Starmer quietly set out on an official journey to Germany and France to “reset” Britain’s relations with Europe. If all goes nicely, this reset would possibly assist Britain regular the post-Brexit ship.

(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London-based senior Indian journalist with three a long time of expertise with the Western media)

Disclaimer: These are the private opinions of the creator