FRUITS de MER

The looters of Branscombe Beach have shamed Britain across the world. What a spectacle they made, these native Devonians and – worse – organised gangs from much farther afield. As containers washed ashore from the cargo ship grounded in the bay, locals and visitors spent Sunday night and all Monday and Tuesday scavenging the beach and smashing open the containers. They made off with clothes and furnishings, petfood in bulk and alcohol in casks, electrical goods and motorbikes.

Good luck to them, you may say. But these were not, in large part, supplies going out to retailers. These were people’s treasured possessions. One woman watched horrified on a news bulletin as a container was torn asunder before the camera and its contents – the sentimental and irreplaceable items of her family’s history that had been on their way to furnish her new life on South Africa – were scooped up by greedy and thoughtless thieves [BBC News at 6, January 22nd].

And thieves these people are. These are the British in the third millennium, a grasping, grabbing, devil-take-the-hindmost nation who care not a fig for anyone else. One looter who spoke to The Guardian gaily described herself as “a retired teacher”. I hope she never had the gall to tell her pupils about right and wrong. “We saw all this stuff here and the police told us we could help ourselves,” she said. “So we did” [report January 23rd].

So, you fall to wondering, what kind of advice is that for the police, of all people, to give? Why weren’t they arresting the looters? On Wednesday, they finally got off their arses and closed the beach. Whether they then set about rescuing the remaining goods from the weather is not recorded. Were I the owner of any goods that were stolen, I should be taking legal advice about suing the Devon constabulary for dereliction of duty. The police have let it be known that they had been unsure of maritime law regarding booty taken from beached vessels. For a police force with one of the most extensive coastlines in Britain, this is a preposterous excuse. There is plenty of video footage and photographic evidence, taken by the coastguard and by the media outlets, that can be used to bring looters to justice. I hope the retired teacher is put in the stocks.

But of course it must be a vain hope that more than a small fraction of the loot will ever be recovered. Many items will already have been sold on eBay, which is now well established as the global successor to the geezer in the pub offering you a “gold” watch. Plenty of eBay buyers are the unwitting receivers of stolen goods. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s so-called “receiver of wreck” has “written to” eBay asking that looted items be taken off sale [report in The Guardian, January 25th]. You know what these civil servants are like: she probably sent it by second class post. And how will eBay know whether a particular item has come from Branscombe Beach? It would be an idiot seller who described the goods he’s auctioning as “looted from a wreck”.

Meanwhile, why did the police allow the public to put itself at such risk? It was not known what hazardous material might come ashore from spillage or indeed among the cargo. A coastguard officer told The Guardian that he had seen “parents leave children on the beach in gale force winds so that they could wade into the surf to ransack containers” [report in The Guardian, January 24th]. We have become so mercenary, so determined to get something for nothing and everything for ourselves, that we are heedless of danger either to us or to our dependants. From each according to his vulnerabilities, to each according to his greed, as Marx certainly didn’t say. Successive waves of capitalism, marketing, Thatcherism and globalization have made looting the primary means of acquisition in our society. No wonder we are going to hell in a handcart.