Napoleon was wrong about England

The British were a burr under Napoleon’s blanket in any number of ways. They continued to fight him when no one else did, but that wasn’t the worst thing.

So fine, that upstart Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, did give some of Napoleon’s generals a bloody nose in the Peninsular War. But the Duke of Wellington, as he became in consequence, had never defeated French troops led by Napoleon personally, not until Waterloo at any rate.

Anyway, come what may, Napoleon Bonaparte – l’Empereur! – could look after himself on the battlefield. He knew how to handle armed resistance with consummate mastery. What he had trouble with was mockery.

And that happened to be the weapon those dastardly British wielded with unrestrained savagery. Their papers made fun of him, coming up with all sorts of disrespectful nicknames, such as ‘Boney’ or, worse still, ‘Little Boney’ – and that was when they didn’t call him ‘Fleshy’, ‘Corsican Fiend’, ‘The Devil’s Favourite’ or ‘The Nightmare of Europe’.

But the worst of all were those two malicious caricaturists, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. They kept churning out pictorial putdowns of Napoleon by the dozen, each nastier than the other. How dared they!

Who did those islanders think they were? Utter philistines, petit bourgeois parvenus, a nation of… A nation of whom exactly? What would be the worst insult a Frenchman, especially one with aristocratic pretensions, could fling at the English? A nation of money-changers? No, that wasn’t strong enough. A nation of manufacturers? No, that could be misconstrued as a compliment.

Finally, the right moniker came to Napoleon. Une nation de boutiquiers! That was it. A nation of shopkeepers, that’s exactly what England was.

Napoleon might or might not have had a point. But I can reassure his spirit that the putdown no longer applies. England has stopped being a nation of shopkeepers. She has become a nation of shoplifters instead.

Over half a million offences were recorded by police in England and Wales last year, a 20 per cent increase on 2023. Yet the police forces admit that this is but the tip of an iceberg. They don’t know exactly how big the iceberg is, but they do know that retailers see no point in reporting most offences.

According to James Lowman, Chief Executive of the Association of Convenience Stores, “The volume of theft is still massively under-reported though: our own member survey revealed 6.2 million thefts recorded by convenience stores alone.”

Eighty per cent of retailers were thus robbed last year, with thefts cutting into their costs and therefore profits. Overall, store owners took a hit way in excess of two billion pounds, which may explain the number of ‘out of business’ signs on high-street shop windows.

Of the roughly half a million offences that were recorded by police, only 19 per cent resulted in a summons or prosecution, of which I am sure none led to a custodial sentence.  

This makes shoplifting de facto legal, presumably on the logic that, if something can’t be stopped, it must be accepted. But England, the perfide Albion of Napoleon’s nightmares, is less forthright about that than California is.

In that fanatically progressive state, stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanour. That means police probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors won’t bother to prosecute.

I don’t know whether such a cutoff point exists in Britain, but I do know that more and more retailers are locking up their merchandise, and not just high-value items. That too is a problem, and on many different levels.

First, this arrangement involves a major investment in refurbishing: those lock-up cases need to be installed, which necessitates changing the overall layout. It also takes time, money and hence a loss of revenue.

(I can testify to that from personal experience. Going across the street to our local Co-op for our customary Saturday-morning croissants, I found the shop closed, to be re-opened soon, as the sign on its window promised. As far as I know, they are installing those lock-up cases, so my croissant fiver had to go elsewhere.)

Then, a customer is no longer able just to pick up an item off the shelf. He has to look for an employee to unlock the case, which adds time to the shopping trip – quite a long time in Britain, especially if the employee doesn’t understand English, which many don’t.

That too ultimately leads to lost revenue because many customers, up to a third if statistics are to be believed, are too impatient to wait. They’d rather move on to a different retailer or forget about that purchase altogether.

Finally, locking up merchandise makes a travesty out of self-checkout, that triumph of technology and a thief’s dream. The idea behind that high-tech innovation was to cut down on store personnel, who could then smoothly move onto the welfare rolls. Now the same number of employees will have to roam the floor, keys in hand, helping irate customers get their hands on that six-pack of lager.

Little Boney would be gloating if he were still around. It took two centuries to turn a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters, but two stock English questions crop up: Why oh why? and What are we going to do about it?

A good answer to the first question will prompt a good answer to the second. For people won’t respect the state’s laws if the state itself doesn’t.

And lack of such respect is precisely what the state signals by refusing to prosecute theft with the same certainty and severity it shows when prosecuting ‘hate crimes’, those of word and increasingly of thought.

When calling a shopkeeper a ‘Paki’ is seen as a worse crime than stealing his merchandise, the law is turned upside down (not that I condone racial insults, as I hope you understand). And when a criminal’s ‘underprivileged’ background is seen as a mitigating, often exculpating, circumstance, the signal becomes loud and clear: now you can.

Add to this a huge influx of migrants from countries where protection of property is seen as less fundamental than it used to be in Britain, and the reality behind shoplifting statistics comes into sharp focus.

Tony Blair came to power partly on the strength of his promise to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. But our progressive modernity can’t be tough on crime because it woefully misunderstands its causes, the principal of which is, well, our progressive modernity.

Denizens of Victorian England were impoverished and ‘underprivileged’ by our standards. And yet people in the East End of London, the land of Fagin and Bill Sykes so vividly described by Dickens, left their doors unlocked, knowing that their neighbours wouldn’t steal from them. And I doubt that shopkeepers had to keep their wares under lock and key.

Those Londoners were as certain about original sin and God’s judgement as they were about the anatomical differences between the two sexes. Courts and policemen shared that certainty. They knew good from evil, and they were prepared to punish wrongdoing because both state and society saw the same dichotomy as clearly.

This was the main source of respect for the law, and that source has run dry. Unless this situation changes, and I’m not holding my breath, shoplifters will continue to put shopkeepers out of business. And Napoleon’s spirit will have to reconsider his putdown of our nation.