WHEN I was seven, I was quite an adept shoplifter. I mastered the art of slipping penny and twopenny bars of chocolate from Woolworths under the cuffs of my school gloves, and walking innocently out on to the streets to enjoy a sweet snack on the way home. Then I had a revelation. Stealing was against the Ten Commandments! At least, this is what I repeated to one of my partners in crime when she suggested our usual pre-bus raid on the sweet counter.
In those days, the Ten Commandments featured quite often in school life, and I was never at a church school. We were compelled to learn them from the Authorised Version, long before we had any clue to what adultery was or what it might mean to covet our neighbour’s ass.
I remember a mathematically minded teacher ruling straight lines on the blackboard and then inviting us to attempt our own without a ruler, and so demonstrating how we all fell short if we did not use “the ruler”, which she then explained were the Ten Commandments: God’s rules for life. So, I got the message.
I don’t for a moment imagine that the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is about to insist on restoring the Ten Commandments to the school curriculum. But I am troubled by the current plague of shoplifting. It’s everywhere. From men in balaclavas with white getaway vans to middle-aged women hunting in packs, thieves are after everything — from toiletries to Lego pieces, bicycles to steaks and claret. No one thinks that anything much is wrong when they put fresh salmon on the self-checkout while showing the reader a tag from a bag of carrots. It’s so easy.
It doesn’t help that shoplifting often seems to be a treated as a victimless crime, as though shopkeepers and store-owners didn’t count. The police do not seem to have the resources to follow up; and first offenders, if caught, are often let go with a caution. The kind-hearted assume that those who steal food items are always poor and hungry. What really disturbs me is that there is no collective effort to moralise the problem: to call it out as selfish, dishonest, anti-social, and just plain wrong.
Yet, the Ten Commandments were surely intended to create and preserve community, to set a standard by which everyone could thrive. You would think that even secularists and libertarians could see the point, at least, of the last six. But perhaps the real problem is that, without something like the fear of God, or draconian punishments, there is less and less to deter those who indulge in theft, whether casual or organised. I wish that, for once, the Church would make itself unpopular for the right reasons. Posters in supermarkets, vicars on the streets — the eye of God is watching you?
