HAVE we all become a little more unpleasant to each other, a little more aggressive, a little more rude and hostile?

It certainly feels like that’s the case.

A few months ago, I wrote about shop workers increasingly having to deal with rude and aggressive customers during the pandemic.

And in June, Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee came to the conclusion that a new criminal offence was needed specifically to protect retail workers following what it described as a ‘shocking upsurge in violence and abuse’.

The Parliamentary website reported that the past five years has seen a shocking increase in the level of violence and abuse directed towards retail workers.

It said: “For millions of shop workers this has become a daily reality. The committee found that abuse and violence increased during the pandemic, concluding that it is appalling that these front-line workers faced greater abuse during the crisis.”

The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) found that 89 per cent of individuals working in local shops had experienced some form of abuse. The Co-op reported a fourfold rise in incidents of violent crime between 2014 and 2020.

The British Retail Consortium reported that the number of incidents recorded last year amounts to the equivalent of one every minute during a typical shopping day.

USDAW reported that 76 per cent of shop workers said that abuse has been worse during the Covid crisis.

Worryingly, the committee also reported that the policing response to retail crime is failing to match ‘the rising tide of violence and abuse’.

On far too many occasions, it said, retail workers are being left alone to manage dangerous situations which put both their physical and mental wellbeing at risk.

The Home Affairs Committee’s own survey found that only one in five shopworkers who reported incidents were satisfied with the response from the police. When the police fail to attend or follow-up serious incidents, it undermines trust and confidence in them, discourages reporting, and weakens the deterrent for repeat offenders.

The committee is chaired by Yvette Cooper and she said: “Everybody should be safe at work. Shop workers are the lifeblood of our local high streets and communities.

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, retail workers kept our communities going and they deserve our thanks and gratitude. It is even more shameful, then, that abuse and assaults against shopworkers went up during the pandemic, and it is completely unacceptable that these attacks have become so commonplace in our society.”

So has rudeness, unpleasantness and aggression become normalised? It certainly feels that’s the case.

Take, for example Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner who has declined to apologise for calling the Conservatives ‘scum’, saying she was using ‘street language’ to convey her ‘anger and frustration’ at the actions of the Government.

She did, however, later explain that she wasn’t referring to all Conservatives as scum, just members of the Cabinet. So that makes it all OK then does it?

Well actually no, it doesn’t make it OK. Regular readers of this column will by now understand my personal antipathy towards the Government, its poor handling of the pandemic – the worst in Europe – and it’s poor handling of Brexit that has left us in the mess we now face.

But the issue as I see it is that while Ms Rayner probably has justifiable points to make about the Conservatives – think food banks, free school meals, removing the £20 Universal Credit uplift, removing the pensions triple lock – by using the sort of aggressive language she chose to vent her frustration, she basically handed the moral high ground to the Tories, allowing them to deflect from the substance of her comments.

Having said that, I don’t think the Tories are in any position to criticise really, are they?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tory MP James Gray who had to apologise after joking about delivering a ‘bomb’ to a Labour MP’s office.

His comments had targeted Labour party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds.

Shockingly the comment was made at the time Labour was holding its conference in Brighton, next door to the Grand Hotel, where an IRA bomb exploded during the Tories’ 1984 conference and killed five people.

As I said, not much moral high ground to be taken.

One final point, I note with some interest that the Home Affairs Committee decided that abuse, aggression and violence has increased over the past five years. And what happened five years ago? The Brexit vote, that’s what happened. Ah Brexit, the gift that just keeps on giving.