You've GOT to be Kidding me?

Añadido: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]I'd like to play something to you before we get into today's video because nothing quite encapsulates what I'm about to talk about like this clip here.

[00:00:08]So, watch this first, then we'll get into it.

[00:00:36]As you can see, an absolute stampede for the exits carrying lots of merchandise and these poor girls trying to stop them from doing so. And Chris Phelp here says, "Well done to the brave young women in JD Sports Ilford who took on the thugs trying to loot their store and retrieving some of the stolen goods." He says, "Shoplifters like this belong in prison." Shame. Labour plans to abolish prison sentences for 99.9% of shoplifterss.

[00:01:09]So that clip was from shadow home secretary Chris Phelp. And here's why he's discussing that. This is Labour's sentencing act which came into force on the 22nd of March this year. It introduces the presumption that courts must suspend custodial sentences of 12 months or less unless there are exceptional circumstances. But there's more which I'll come into in the second half of the video. But in practice, what all this means for shoplifting is rather devastating on these businesses.

[00:01:44]Because official government data shows that in the year to September, only 144 shoplifterss received prison terms of more than 12 months. During the same period, 12,590 shop thieves were handed custodial sentences of less than 12 months, meaning they can now expect to get a suspended sentence under these new changes. That is 98% or more of currently imprisoned shoplifterss who would now be eligible for community-based alternatives rather than prison. Meanwhile, retail theft costs an estimated 2 billion pounds last year and more than 40% of shop workers reported experienced hostility or abuse in just the last 6 months. John Lewis's chairman said that it was the worst that he's seen in 35 years in retail. Markx and Spencer executives have been writing directly to the home secretary and to the mayor of London. Balaclava wearing gangs such as some that you'll see in videos like this have been storming shops in broad daylight in various areas in socially organized social media linkup events that they call them and with without fear it would seem of any reprisal or consequences whatsoever. And the government's response to things like this is to make it virtually certain that these sort of shoplifterss will not go to prison. And as Chris Phil puts it, even prolific shoplifterss generally get less than a year in prison at the moment. So Labour's plan to abolish prison sentences of under a year means that shoplifterss will just never go to prison at all. Say for the most extreme cases and the most prolific or whatever, you know, they will just not go to prison.

[00:03:32]So, let's think about that for a moment because the very same week that this sentencing reform is being debated, the justice secretary David Lammy has published a youth justice white paper and in it he says that parents could face prison time for their children's behavior. On another topic, just for a moment, many of you have emailed me to say that your phone and various apps are demanding age verification using face scans and IDs and all sorts of other stuff. Naturally, it has many of you worried. It is especially alarming when you get stories like this where the EU and the UK has been approached by the US to negotiate a deal to share citizens biometric data which would allow an unprecedented sharing of information for your specific biometric data with the US and who knows wherever else. That is obviously a concern because many people want to maintain their privacy. Now, the bottom line is there is not a lot you can do about the phone or the apps demanding age verification because of the new laws in the UK. What you can do, and I absolutely recommend you do more than ever, is to maintain your anonymity online as best you can. That is why I partner with NordVPN on this channel. If you haven't signed up, now is a great time to do so because you absolutely must protect your anonymity online.

[00:04:56]NordVPN does not keep any logs or traces of what you do online. So regardless of the facial recognition and age verifications that they do, this is the best way of maintaining your anonymity and privacy whilst you use other apps, other websites and devices whilst you're online. NordVPN will also scan and check websites and downloads for malicious content and protect you in that way.

[00:05:22]This is particularly important if you're traveling and you connect to public Wi-Fi networks, which can often have man-in-the-middle attacks and all sorts of other security flaws that grants them access to your machines or allows a hacker a way in. And as they're a partner to my channel, you can get 4 months extra off the 2-year plan using my code BBB, which I'll put as a link in the description below. It is cheaper than the price of a cup of coffee. You get 30 days to change your mind. But once you see how easy and quick it is to install on all your devices, I use it on all my devices and I have done for years and I paid for it before I partnered with NordVPN on this channel. So once again, that code is BBB at the link in the description below. You will not regret it. So we've reached a position where shoplifterss may not go to prison, but their parents might for what they are doing because they don't parent them properly. Now I'm all for parents parenting children properly, you understand? But when we have a combination like this, it just isn't really going to work. Now, the centerpiece of this masterpiece of proposals is the strengthening of parenting orders. These are not a new thing. These have existed for some time, and they've been on the statute books since the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. Under the current law, a court can compel a parent to attend counseling, guidance, or other parenting classes where their child is convicted of a criminal offense or given an antisocial behavior order. The problem, however, is that the government's own admission is that they've barely been used. The use of parenting orders has declined dramatically over the last two decades from more than a thousand in 2009 and 2010 to just 33 in 2022 and 2023. So clearly not being used potentially they weren't useful but 33 in the whole of England and Wales in a year. So the question now isn't whether these orders should exist. You know they do. The question is why they've been so comprehensively abandoned and whether making them tougher is really going to achieve anything.

[00:07:28]So that might lead people to ask the question, can parents already go to prison for what their children have done? Well, yes, technically they could if a parenting order is made and the parent willfully fails to comply with that order, which is a feature in many of these types of offenses where someone ends up going to prison where they wouldn't normally go to prison in the first place, but they willfully fail to comply with something, then that is already a criminal offense. David Lami is now saying that he wants judges to have the clear stronger powers to act in what he calls extreme cases. Now, if that were applied properly and the law were well drafted and it was well executed and it was absolutely never open to abuse or anything else of the sort, then indeed that might work in those extreme cases. And when talking about the new proposals and asked directly on camera whether parents could face jail time, David Lammy admitted that they could in extreme cases, adding that it's important that judges have the full power to do what is necessary. So that bears repeating. David Lammy wants judges to have the full power to send a parent to prison for their children's behavior if well their children commit these offenses. Not that there's any sort of safeguards in between necessarily, but only in extreme cases.

[00:08:48]So hopefully there will be some safeguards. So you know, to be fair here, there is a legitimate argument.

[00:08:54]There are parents who, you know, simply aren't struggling or aren't overwhelmed or aren't the victims of any sort of circumstance of their own. They're just actively and sometimes deliberately failing their children. And the communities are suffering for it. And in those cases, there are real consequences. And so, you know, real consequences therefore for the parents are not necessarily unreasonable. But it doesn't end there. And so, here's the problem. The evidence that jailing a parent makes a child's situation better is weak. It usually makes it worse.

[00:09:29]Because you see, the problem is this, and it's similar with family courts and things like that. You know, a parent in prison typically means that a child goes into care or a child is more exposed to the precise sort of circumstances and, you know, situations that lead them to offending in the first place. And a child significantly more likely to end up in the criminal justice system themselves in such a situation. So you'd be jailing a parent and creating essentially the next generation of offenders simultaneously, not least of which because they might stand against the system for jailing their parent, knowing that it was their fault that they did something wrong. And so instead of correcting that behavior, they then foster this anger and frustration at the system for jailing their parent and meaning that they end up in care or maybe they're just angry and frustrated that they end up in care and not in their parents home or whatever. So this is not really a proper strategy. This is some sort of a gesture really by jailing the parents. If it doesn't have the actual outcome, then it can't be a successful strategy. But the more interesting part of the white paper and the part that's probably getting the least attention is the proposal to pilot youth intervention courts. These would bring together judges and support services, you know, health and education and social work, etc. to deal with the young offenders in a joined up way. And the evidence from similar models elsewhere, such as the drug courts in America, problem solving courts in Scotland, is very sort of cautiously positive. Things are looking up, but they're not transformative entirely, but it is moving in the right direction. You see, it stands to reason that a judge who understands the full background of a young person's health and education and family background and circumstances surrounding everything that they grow up in can make a more proportionate and useful decision than a judge just seeing them for 15 minutes on some sort of conveyor belt and then sending them off to prison.

[00:11:28]Interestingly enough, 15.4 4 million a year has been earmarked in support of 12,000 odd children at risk of entering the youth justice system over the next 3 years which is relatively modest but at least it is moving in the right direction. But then we look at the criminal records aspect and the consultation on childhood criminal records because at the moment in certain circumstances a conviction from childhood can follow someone for the rest of their life particularly into job applications whatever all through their life into their 60s. Offenses which took place in childhood have in some cases hampered the life chances of someone even well into their 60s. The entire philosophy of having a separate youth justice system is that children are not the same as adults. They can be changed.

[00:12:14]They can turn their lives around. They can take themselves out of a bad situation and rebuild their lives. The whole point of a youth court and youth rehabilitation orders and the criminal responsibility threshold that is applied to children is that we treat children differently because they are different.

[00:12:32]And yet the conviction can follow them indefinitely. Now there are categories where lifelong disclosure is clearly justified. The most serious violent and sexual offenses. No one is arguing otherwise, but the current system is fairly blunt and doesn't distinguish well enough between some of the more serious and some relatively more trivial. So reform in this area is well overdue. I'm just not convinced that it's the right approach to be sending parents to prison for it. So my overriding conclusion to all of this with a hint of personal opinion is that you cannot credibly announce new tough consequences for parents of misbehaving children at the same time you've brought into force a law which means that virtually no shoplifterss including those children will ever possibly go to prison for it. You cannot seriously talk about a deterrence and consequences and community safety while simultaneously removing the same deterrent for the most visible and the most prevalent form of crime in the country such as the shoplifting I showed you at the beginning. 519,000 shoplifting crimes were recorded last year. Under the new sentencing framework, only 144 of them will go to prison. That is just one every few thousand offenses. And so what we're being told at the same time is that we need stronger parenting orders potentially including custody of parents in extreme cases where children are misbehaving. So the contradiction here is palpable, but let me know what you think in the comments below. And as always, thank you for watching.