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- 01 30, 2025
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The moonUnder WaterDWPdwpDWP pub is not far from Watford Football Club. It is large, and its prices are low. It is the sort of place where you might expect rowdy behaviour. And until a few years ago Kwame Tefe, who manages it, often removed the chairs and served beer in plastic cups on game days. Today he sees no need.In the Moon Under Water, and in Britain generally, disorder has become rare. Two decades ago one-quarter of people told the Crime Survey of England and Wales that public or rowdiness were big problems locally. Songs released at that time, by Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and The Streets, were about fights in kebab shops and over taxis. Since then rowdiness has fallen by half. Vandalism has declined even more (see chart 1).Britain has become better behaved in some ways. But it has also grown sneaky. Some kinds of dishonesty are more accepted and more common than they used to be. The same people—the , especially men—appear to be driving both trends. The emergence of a polite, lying society might be due to a combination of technological change and sloppy government.For many years the British Social Attitudes Survey has asked people what they would think if an unemployed person earned £500 ($610) and did not declare it to the benefits office. The proportion who see that as wrong has fallen (see chart 2). Of course, inflation has eaten away the value of £500. Yet people are now more relaxed about the failure to declare £3,000 than they were about the failure to declare £500 less than a decade ago.Lest that be thought a purely theoretical measure, the Department for Work and Pensions () estimates that 3.7% of its expenditure in the 2023-24 fiscal year went on overpaying benefits, up from 1.9% in 2015-16. Fraud is not the only reason for overpayment; confusion over changes in the benefits system is another. But the thinks that dishonesty is growing.Benefits recipients are not the only people at it. Grocers are suffering more unexplained losses, or what they call “shrink”. The chairman of Marks & Spencer, a high-street fixture, has suggested that middle-class shoplifters are partly to blame. Many businesses seem to be dodging taxes. The corporation-tax gap for small firms—the extent to which payments fall short of theoretical liabilities—grew from 15% to 32% in the ten years to 2022-23, according to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.By comparing surveys from 2011 and 2023, David Shepherd, a criminologist at the University of Portsmouth, has shown that Britons have become less tolerant of certain behaviours that seem likely to harm people, such as speeding and underage sex. But they have become more tolerant of cheating on benefits, buying stolen property and taking bribes—all behaviours where the victim is less obvious. The decline in integrity has been driven by the young. The old are as upstanding as ever.Mr Shepherd thinks that the internet and social media may have encouraged dishonesty. In another study, he found that more than half of 16- to 24-year-old men admitted to knowingly buying counterfeit goods in the past year. Many men say that the goods were endorsed by online influencers. “Young people are influenced; old people are not,” Mr Shepherd notes.Ofcom, a media regulator, found in 2023 that 87% of people had seen something online that they thought was a scam, and 46% had been drawn in (though few lost money). Contrary to the stereotype, the young and middle-aged are no less vulnerable than the old. The failure of technology firms and government agencies to stop online fraud may have persuaded people that the digital world is dishonest. If you believe that, it might be easier to lie online when applying for welfare benefits.Technology could also be smoothing the road to offline theft. Emmeline Taylor, an expert on retail crime at City, University of London, thinks that the spread of self-check-outs and hand-held scanners has turned shoplifting from a tawdry crime into a trick or even a game, like playing a fruit machine. Offenders may tell themselves that cheating a machine is not like mugging someone. If challenged, they can say they made an honest mistake.Add to these technological temptations a growing belief that miscreants are getting away with it. Between 2019 and 2022 the proportion of people who told the British Social Attitudes survey that benefit cheats were likely to be caught fell from 41% to 28%. In October 2024 polling by YouGov showed that half of Londoners who often take trains or the Tube frequently see people squeezing through the barriers without paying. One-fifth of Britons have witnessed shoplifting in the past year.If, around 2020, Britons sensed that fraud was becoming less risky, they were right. Between March and June of that year, as covid-19 raged, the relaxed fraud controls and redeployed thousands of counter-fraud staff. The government also threw money at businesses to help them recover. That led to £10.5bn-worth of fraud and error, according to the National Audit Office, a watchdog.When firms and the authorities get their act together, behaviour can improve dramatically. Sir Tim Martin, the founder of Wetherspoons, which owns 800-odd pubs including the Moon Under Water, thinks that two changes have made pubs more civil. The first is the growing tolerance of children in bars, which has been driven by changes in licensing laws. The second is the growth of Pubwatch schemes, which enable pubs to form a united front against troublesome customers. A person who is barred from one pub may be instantly barred from all nearby ones—a strong incentive not to act up.In the mid-1940s George Orwell asserted that the English were unusually upstanding. Newspaper-sellers could safely leave their change on the pavement when they went for lunch, the writer claimed. If Britons were really unusual then, they are not now. Polling by the World Values Survey shows that they are about average among Europeans when it comes to their feelings about fare-dodging—although they are less inured to benefit fraud than the residents of some countries, such as France and Spain.Orwell would have been disappointed. But another change would have delighted him. In 1946 he wrote in the about a pub that admitted children (although it was against the law at the time) and was seldom bothered by “drunks and rowdies” even on Saturday nights. The pub did not really exist—Orwell had invented it, along with a fanciful name. He called it The Moon Under Water.