Do we really need truncheons and pepper spray to fight off London’s ‘feral’ teenage shoplifters? | Zoe Williams

I don’t want to minimise the scenes in Clapham High Street. But how about dialling things down a notch? Last week, some teenagers in the Clapham area of south-west London started running up and down the high street. The terms used to describe them ranged from “feral gang” to “chaotic swarm”; evidently, it is in the eye of the beholder as to whether they were closer to animals or insects. Definitely, positively, some of them shoplifted. Fireworks were let off, which sounds like the kind of mischief the Bash Street Kids would get up to, but is quite scary in real life, and the line between “Beano” and “scary” is finer than I thought. Marks & Spencer needed a police guard and closed early; Oliver Bonas briefly had a security guard, which was like seeing a bouncer outside a library – either a mad overreaction, or the end of days. Things started to gallop after that, in a manner typical of the world’s frothy discourse. On Friday, the London mayor Sadiq Khan’s police detail left a bag of guns on the street outside his house, a mere four tube stops (then a walk) away from Clapham, and these events collided in many imaginations, particularly on radio phone-ins, to p

Apr 6, 2026 → Apr 10, 2026