Three seagulls peck the carcass of a hot-pink Casio keyboard. A pile of Atomic Kitten CDs tiles the muddy ground. Steam rises from flasks of tea, clutched by pink fingers through fingerless gloves. This is Hounslow Heath car-boot sale, otherwise known as “the dark heart of lawless Britain”, in the words of shadow justice secretary and grim-fluencer Robert Jenrick. In a recent social media stunt, he accused traders here of selling stolen tools. In the video, he confronts men who pull balaclavas over their heads and ask him to move on, and poses with name-tagged drills and other equipment he believes was nicked from builders’ vans. “My view is the police should come and check here, but I don’t think they’re doing their job properly,” he observes.
“The funny thing is, police are here all the time,” one Hounslow trader who had seen Jenrick’s video told me. In fact, police had raided the site the morning of my visit: they hadn’t found any wrongdoing. It’s hardly surprising – the priciest products I saw were a gleaming, sage-green Imperial typewriter and some spooky vintage dolls. Having sold what he fondly called “junk” from house clearances here for 20 years, the trader had seen law enforcement “getting more serious and more personal” regarding dodgy, and especially counterfeit, goods for sale in recent years.
The problem I found during my visit was that power-tool dealers from as far as Glasgow, Birmingham and Liverpool would pitch up for the day, disappear again and pop up at another site. “They’re not local. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to sell their stolen gear where they live,” I was told by the seller of second-hand ovens and hoovers. “They’re the big fish, they’re organised – they probably make thousands a day whereas I’m lucky to make 200 quid.”
What Jenrick had missed in his bid for a gotcha clip was the suspected organised crime element of the story – something the hallowed Westminster cliché of “more bobbies on the beat” wouldn’t necessarily solve. In fact, criminal networks are behind a number of highly visible crimes – often dismissed as “low level” or “petty” – that are a feature of day-to-day life in Britain today.
Where shoplifting was the preserve of, say, desperate parents stealing baby formula at the height of price inflation, it is increasingly becoming a professional operation. Organised crime groups are shoplifting items to order and selling them on at car-boot sales, according to Cambridgeshire Police. It has set up a team to target these thieves – and warns shoppers that goods they find “cheaper than what they might find in the shop at car boots” could be a sign of “organised crime”.
Similarly, rising phone and car thefts aren’t merely the result of more opportunists looking for a quick sell. These thefts, too, are linked to criminal gangs that ship phones and cars to be sold second-hand in China and Africa. In the public imagination, organised crime groups are involved in the dark stuff of police drama. Drug dealing, armed robbery, people smuggling, human trafficking. Things that sound frightening but in reality are very unlikely to affect to average Brit going about their life. But organised crime is now creeping into our daily lives. Hundreds of convenience stores have been selling meat stolen from supermarkets, for example. And anyone attempting to learn to drive at the moment will encounter the black market that has sprung up around booking tests.
This reality lays obstacles for both the left and right of British politics. The left can’t simply dismiss petty theft as a social symptom of the cost-of-living crisis, and the right can’t just blame the immorality of the individual. Targeting organised crime – and the most prevalent offence of all, fraud – is a lot less electorally compelling than recruiting more uniformed officers. Intelligence analysts and National Crime Agency agents don’t feature in our cartoonish Happy Families conception of what constitutes a tangible, worthy job. “Smash the gangs” was a far less vivid slogan than “Stop the boats”, after all.
It’s a challenge for police forces, too, who focus more resources on what they term “higher-harm” offences – those that cause the most damage to victims. Just 7.3 per cent of all criminal offences result in a charge or summons in England and Wales. This has understandably harboured a feeling among the public that the police have given up on burglaries and phone-snatching and the everyday crimes that we believed they were there to solve. Such crimes stop seeming “low level” when the criminal networks behind them become ever clearer.
A few years ago, I had my beloved black-and-white B’Twin road bike stolen from outside the cinema (yes, I know, never signal to thieves that you’re guaranteed to be absent for a minimum of two hours…). I came out into the night to find the bike rack festooned with angle-ground locks: every bike on that rack had been stolen in full view of the next-door supermarket’s CCTV. They must have had a van. The police closed the case almost as soon as I opened it, so I went to a car-boot sale in east London known locally as a purgatory of stolen bikes. Describing my bike to various indifferent sellers (“extra small, looks like a child’s?”), I got nowhere. But it does make me realise one thing: in car-boot Britain, it’s every man for himself – apart from the crooked traders, who have a whole invisible network swirling far beyond the banter and bric-a-brac.
[Further reading: Britain must make things again]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand