With casual shoplifting and fare evasion rife, are we as a society getting naughtier?

Broadstairs writer and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd says it’s no wonder people’s sense of moral duty is in decline…

My mate Danielle refuses to pay her train fare. About five years ago she saw a train guard badgering every black and brown person on the train for their ticket, while ignoring the white passengers: since then, she’s considered it her moral duty to refuse to contribute to this racist regimen, and takes great pleasure in hiding in loos, leaping over barriers, and pretending to faint when challenged. They gave her a court date, but she claimed she had Covid, and she’s heard no more since.

If you’re outraged by her antics you’re in a minority. Britain is now much more comfortable with dishonesty than ever it used to be, with the young much less likely to be outraged. This is in part due to technological change, but also, I suspect, the result of our own law-makers, the people in power, gaily breaking the rules whenever it suits them, then lying about it.

People are getting away with it too. In October 2024 half of Londoners claimed to have seen fellow travellers squeeze over train barriers without paying. Knowing your cash will go to pay shareholder dividends, rather than improving the service, makes it harder to care, no?

Technology has changed shoplifting from a tawdry crime to a game, like playing a fruit machine. Cheating a self-service machine feels victimless, a long way from mugging someone. If caught you can claim you made an honest mistake, and who will really be hurt by your fibs? Zillionaire investors? Who could care less about them?

For many years the British social attitudes survey has asked people what they would think if an unemployed person on benefits earned £500 and didn’t declare it. The proportion of Brits that see that as wrong has fallen considerably, from 88% in 2000 to 52% in 2025. When 72 poor people are allowed to die at Grenfell because fire-resistant cladding looked too ugly for their wealthy neighbours to tolerate, how can a poor person earning £500 be called a crime?

And yet we have grown more prissy over certain perceived moral lapses. In both the UK and the US the one area where laws became more punitive in the 20th century was drug use. Pretty much everything was legal until the 1950s. Cocaine and opium, happily guzzled for decades, became illegal. The number of banned narcotics more than tripled between 1950 and 1970. The one time my grandad went to the dentist as a boy he was given cocaine. He would have gone back more but couldn't afford it until the NHS arrived in his forties. At least the dentures he then needed were free.

We have also become more uptight around sex and sexuality. I used to run into pubs and do strippergrams until about 2005: if I tried that now, people would claim to be traumatised, probably in need of counselling. Not because I’m that much older and fatter, although obviously I am, but because sexuality is once more regarded as terrifying and traumatising, something to be hidden away and make one ashamed. The outcry over Onlyfans girls and their sexy stunts demonstrates that: the deep rage at women utilising their sexuality for profit and attention, whether that rage is barely concealed as pity, or displayed as rage in all its naked primeval fury, tells of a society no longer at ease with people doing as they please with their bodies. They must be judged, mocked, found wanting, categorised as tragic, or loathsome, but anyway, definitely freaks, rather than just people who behave differently from you, whose behaviour doesn’t affect your life in the least. I do know that the Big Brother of 1984 was keen to eradicate sex and sexuality, so that every primeval force within the human breast could be channelled towards a muddled patriotism. Is this life mirroring art?

I don't know. But I do know genuine respect for social mores is the result of possessing something which those mores exist to guard. When fewer of us have a stake in this society, unable to afford a decent education or home, nor to look forward to a stable career, can we be surprised we’ve less interest in the rules? We have nothing to lose. It’s a terrible wonderful freedom, having nothing to lose. It reduces one’s sense of social duty to a simple formula: get what you want, by any means - just don’t get caught.