Speaking on LBC this morning the prime minister also defended his handling of William Wragg sexting scandal
Rishis Sunak has told retail workers he has “got their backs” and spoke of his own experience of his parent’s business dealing with shoplifters while announcing a crackdown on the crime which will invlove money to use facial recognition technology in stores.
Speaking on LBC, Sunak said “It’s not acceptable. It’s absolutely not right” about a rise in shoplifting figures. He said:
That’s why we’ve said we’ll introduce a new crime of assaulting retail workers shop workers, because it’s not right. They should be able to go about their day to day lives without fear of being assaulted by people. That’s why we’re introducing a brand new offence to target people who do that, and we’re working closely with [retailers and the police] to make sure that prolific offenders actually are not able to come into their shops in the first place, with the use of tags and things like that.
The reason we’re changing the law today is because first of all we accept that this continues to be a problem and that it has increased.
And secondly because we think that it will work well for the purpose of recording the offence, this specific offence, and also because we’re attaching bespoke sanctions to it, different sanctions that would apply to ordinary assault.
People can judge me if they want to judge me on that, that’s fine, I accept that. When it comes to weakness I know Keir Starmer still hasn’t answered any questions properly about what’s going on with Angela Rayner. When it comes to me and my affairs people are very happy to ask lots of questions, including Angela Rayner herself.
