Residents of Avondale Court, next to the Highfield House asylum hotel, have reported a spate of missing packages after several Evri packages vanished from their doorsteps. The incidents, reported to Hampshire are just the latest sign that petty theft is becoming a part of daily life in our low-trust society under a Labour government.
Residents were astonished as parcels regularly started disappearing “You just don’t expect your post to go missing on your own doorstep,” said one resident, who asked not to be named. “But now it’s happened to several of us — it’s just another thing you have to worry about.”
It’s hard not to notice the sharp drop in trust on British streets. Sebastien Payne, writing in The Times, recently described how Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, was once awestruck by the honesty he encountered in post-war London in the 1950s. When Lee visited Trafalgar Square, he saw newspapers for sale with not a vendor in sight. People would take a paper, leave the cash in an open box, and even make their own change. “This is really a civilised society,” Lee concluded, inspired to recreate such an environment back home.
That world feels long gone. Today, a box of cash wouldn’t last an hour in central London — and the newspapers would probably vanish, too. The sense of order and civility that so impressed Lee has, bit by bit, ebbed away.
Take shoplifting. Offences in London rose by 54 per cent last year alone. Across the country, the rise was 20 per cent. Surrey saw a four-fold increase in charges for shoplifting, and records have been broken in West, South, and North Yorkshire. The British Retail Consortium estimates that theft now costs local economies £2.2 billion a year.
On St John’s Wood high street — not exactly the rough end of town — three men on stolen Lime bikes raided shops in broad daylight last Saturday. Police didn’t show up, so the men simply came back later and did it again.
It’s these small, daily acts of dishonesty that chip away at trust and make life that little bit harder for everyone. A missing package might seem trivial, but it’s a symptom of a society losing faith in itself — and in each other.
