Shoplifters, Starmer and the Cult of Process

There are moments when a country reveals itself with a kind of accidental clarity, not in the great ceremonial language of politics, nor in the slogans with which governments flatter themselves, but in some apparently local incident in which ordinary people suddenly see, with perfect plainness, what sort of civilisation they are now living in. The recent firings at Waitrose and Morrisons belong to that category. Here were two men, one after 17years of service and one after 29, who, in the old moral vocabulary of this country, would have been recognised as men trying, however imperfectly, to do the decent thing in the middle of a disorderly moment. One saw a thief trying to walk out with stolen goods and intervened. The other confronted a repeat offender who, by his account, turned aggressive and spat at him. Neither was hailed as a loyal servant who had acted under pressure in defence of his workplace and the ordinary standards on which civil life depends. Both were treated, instead, as procedural failures. That, in itself, tells us a great deal about what Britain has become.

Now, I’ve been in HR for most of my 30-odd career years. Since then, I have seen what used to be called ‘Personnel’ grow into a vast industry of policy pushers and woke enforcers, binding businesses and employers with so much red tape you could be forgiven for asking if you are engaging with a social engineering think tank rather than the company that sells you electricity. Part of this is an inevitable consequence of state interference in just about every aspect of commercial life in the UK these days. The almost universally negative public reaction we have seen to the incidents in the last week has probably surprised both Morrisons and Waitrose. Newspapers, TV channels, pundits and journalists and even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police have called out the companies for making the wrong decision. While we don’t know the details, it’s no surprise to me as an HR professional that the companies have doubled down. 

The first instinct of the modern managerial mind is always to say that this is not really about theft, courage, judgement, loyalty, public order or even common sense, but about policy. That word now does an extraordinary amount of work in British life. Policy is how institutions avoid thinking morally. Policy is how they evade awkward distinctions between an honest man acting rashly and a scoundrel acting habitually. Policy is how they replace judgement with administration. Waitrose’s answer was that safety must come first, and no one can seriously object to the proposition that employers should not be encouraging staff to place themselves at risk. Morrisons’ answer was in substance similar: that there are procedures for dealing with shoplifters and that employees are expected to follow them. Again, taken abstractly, this is perfectly intelligible. But that is precisely why it is not enough. The problem in Britain now is rarely that process is wholly irrational in itself. The problem is that process has become sovereign, and once process becomes sovereign the thing it was meant to serve is quietly forgotten.

That is why these cases have struck such a nerve. The public response has not been one of legal curiosity or HR sympathy, but of moral recognition. Most decent people can still see the shape of the issue, even if the people who run our institutions increasingly cannot. They understand that a shop does not merely contain stock but embodies a social norm, namely that goods are paid for, that theft is wrong, that staff are not there merely to smile apologetically while habitual criminals strip the shelves, and that a society in which no one is permitted to act against wrongdoing in the moment of wrongdoing is a society that is becoming unserious about order. Walker Smith’s case became sufficiently resonant that Richard Walker of Iceland publicly offered him a job. Sean Egan, for his part, described not merely the loss of employment but the personal and financial wreckage left behind, the loss of income, the jeopardising of pension expectations and the sense of having been thrown away by an institution to which he had given most of his working life. These details matter, because managerial culture is always tempted to speak as if dismissal were a sterile administrative outcome rather than a human punishment visited on a particular person.

It’s here that the older language of the King’s Peace becomes useful, not as antiquarian decoration, and not because one wishes to romanticise brawling in supermarket aisles, but because it reminds us of something our elites have largely forgotten. Order in this country was never understood simply as a service delivered by accredited professionals to a passive public. The common law tradition presupposed something more demanding and more adult, namely that the peace of the realm was sustained not only by the Crown’s officers, but by the habits, loyalties and moral reflexes of the people themselves. Modern statute has not entirely erased that assumption. Section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 still allows a person other than a constable, in defined circumstances, to arrest without warrant someone committing or reasonably suspected of committing an indictable offence. One should be careful here. This is not a roving licence for vigilantism, nor does it impose a universal legal obligation to wade into danger. But it does show that the legal imagination of this country has not fully accepted the anthropology of the HR department. It still recognises, however cautiously, that the citizen may sometimes act, and that the maintenance of order is not conceptually alien to ordinary people.

What corporate Britain increasingly says, by contrast, is something much colder and more revealing. It says that the employee must cease, at the threshold of employment, to be a citizen in any substantive sense. He becomes instead a compliance unit. His first moral responsibility is not to the immediate reality in front of him, nor to the ordinary public who expect a shop not to become an open invitation to predation, nor even to the employer’s property in the common sense meaning of that phrase. His first responsibility is to the internal architecture of managed liability. If a thief walks out with stolen goods, that is unfortunate. If a member of staff breaches protocol while trying to stop him, that is actionable. In other words, wrongdoing itself becomes secondary to deviation from process. The institution will tolerate a surprising amount of external disorder before it will tolerate any internal breach of the script. That is an extraordinary inversion, and once one notices it, one sees it everywhere.

One sees it, for example, in Keir Starmer’s own political manner. His statement to Parliament on April 20th over Peter Mandelson’s appointment was striking not simply because of the substantive controversy, but because of the language in which he chose to defend himself and his Government. Again and again the emphasis fell not on judgement, instinct, accountability or political seriousness, but on process, review, proper channels, formalities, the sequence by which things were done, the mechanisms by which information was supposedly handled. That instinct is not accidental. It is not merely the style of a lawyer. It is the grammar of the managerial state, which increasingly seeks legitimacy not from wisdom or even candour, but from the claim that boxes were ticked in the approved order. The public, however, is asking a different question. It is asking whether the thing was handled sensibly, honestly and in the spirit of what government is for. To that question, process is often a deflection rather than an answer.

This, then, is the deeper parallel between the sackings of supermarket staff and the language of modern government. In both settings, managerialism has displaced judgement. In both settings, those in authority speak as though the decisive moral fact is not that theft occurred, not that disorder spread, not that trust was weakened, not that citizens increasingly feel abandoned, but that approved procedure existed and was, allegedly, respected. In both settings, responsibility is dissolved into systems language. Nobody need say, plainly, ‘this was absurd’, or ‘that man acted as many decent people would have acted’, or ‘we are allowing forms of anti-social behaviour to become normal which any healthy society would stigmatise and suppress’. Instead we are invited to believe that what matters most is whether the risk matrix was honoured. That is why Britain now feels so unnervingly out of priority, so visibly misaligned with the moral instincts of ordinary people. The hierarchy of concern has been reversed. The system now protects itself first, and only then, if at all, the public good it was supposedly created to defend.

There was a time when Parliamentary democracy in this country depended upon the assumption that men in office possessed not merely technical knowledge but a feel for the grain of the nation, a sense of proportion, an ability to distinguish between the central and the incidental, between a rule and the reason for the rule. There was a time, too, when our common law civilisation assumed that liberty was compatible with order precisely because people had been formed to exercise judgement rather than to outsource all responsibility to systems. That inheritance has not disappeared altogether, but it has been steadily hollowed out by a class of professional managers, in politics, corporations, universities, quangos and public bodies, who have come to believe that a properly documented procedure is the highest form of moral seriousness. It is not. Procedure is useful, often necessary, occasionally indispensable; but once it becomes detached from moral purpose it degenerates into a species of organised evasion. It becomes a way of avoiding the plain truth that institutions are there to uphold a social world, not merely to minimise their own exposure within it.

That is why so many people now feel, often without putting it in these terms, that they are living under something closer to rule by HR than rule by law. Rule by law, in the best sense, means known standards, fairly applied, under a constitutional order that still recognises the moral agency of the citizen. Rule by HR means the opposite tendency: a proliferating web of protocols designed less to sustain a moral world than to immunise institutions against the consequences of inhabiting one. It is the difference between a society that asks what is right and one that asks what is safest to write down afterwards. It is the difference between honouring the spirit in which free people live together and submitting all human reality to the bureaucratic afterlife of incident reporting. We have, in too many places, chosen the latter. Then we affect surprise that theft is normalised, public trust collapses, Parliament sounds like a compliance seminar and decent people increasingly conclude that the institutions over them no longer inhabit the same country as they do.

The image that comes to mind is a simple one, because the truth of the matter is simple. The barn is burning, and our governing classes are checking whether the phone number for the fire brigade is correctly printed on the extinguisher. They are not wholly wrong that the label should be there. It’s just that, in any serious civilisation, no one would mistake the label for the fire. That, unfortunately, is very close to where Britain now finds itself. We have created a culture in which men may be punished for acting as citizens, politicians may defend failure by invoking process, and institutions may congratulate themselves on compliance while the moral ecology around them deteriorates. A country cannot be healthy on those terms for long. The King’s Peace, whether or not one uses that older phrase, depends finally on a people who know that order is everybody’s business, and on institutions wise enough not to punish them for remembering it.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.