It was little things that made me fall in love with Britain. You didn’t have to count your change in shops. You almost never saw private security guards. You could drink from the tap. You could flick a switch and the light would actually come on.

You could get into a taxi, confident, not only that you wouldn’t be mugged, but that you’d be driven by the shortest route and charged the correct fare. If you stopped at a red light, you would not have every car behind you hooting in fury. You could send valuables by post.

Arriving as a seven-year-old from Peru, I felt a glow of wonder at these things that, even now, has not entirely left me. I thought then, and I still think, that people who have grown up in this country are unconscionably blasé about what made it special.

Only much later did I find a phrase to explain what differentiated Britain, not just from Peru, but from most places. That phrase was “social capital”. Because Britain was a high-trust society, everyday transactions were frictionless. The cost of doing business was low, because neither side had to take expensive precautions against fraud. Social capital gave Brits a sense of patriotism and responsibility. They accepted election results when their party lost, obeyed laws with which they disagreed, paid their taxes grumblingly but honestly.

That, at least, was how it used to work – to the wonder of foreign visitors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. But our social capital is flooding away.

We see it in lots of ways. Take the epidemic of shoplifting. Last year, retailers logged 20.4 million incidents of theft, an increase of 3.7 million on 2023. Or look at our filthy streets. The touristy parts of central London manage to pick up most of the debris, but every other part of the capital is grubbier than before lockdown, with fast-food wrappings and cartons blowing about forlornly.

The Government’s response is to ban single-use vapes. Now vapes do contribute to the detritus, but that reaction is a classic example of politicians tackling a side-issue because they can’t bring themselves to face the main one – rather as they responded to the Manchester Arena bombing, not by cracking down on the immigration loopholes that had let the Abedis into Britain, but by requiring staff at small venues to do anti-terrorism training.

The problem is not that vapes are messy, it is that people no longer care how their streets look. Why this has happened – largely over the past five years – is an underexplored question.

Have we imported a new population from countries where dropping litter is normal? Is it a consequence of fewer people being in offices, either because they have discovered invalidity benefits or because they are pretending to work from home? Or was it the lockdown itself? Did being cut off from human contact, raptly scrolling through online conspiracy theories, push a generation into anomie?

We should be asking the same questions about stealing from shops, which now costs retailers (or, rather, non-shoplifting customers) £2 billion a year. The thing that used to hold most people back from shoplifting was not fear of criminal sanction – few are caught, fewer detained and almost none prosecuted – so much as a feeling that it was unacceptable. That feeling, like so many things, was vitiated by the pandemic. At the same time, mass immigration dilutes the homogeneity on which high-trust societies depend.

When a nation’s character alters, the enforcement of its laws shifts before the laws themselves. In theory, we still have statutes against theft. In practice, the police are less interested in enforcing them than in going after people with unfashionable views.

It is unthinkable that someone like Lucy Connolly, jailed for an intemperate post, would be in prison had she nicked stuff from M&S – not even had she been caught a dozen times before. Coppers are ceasing to be citizens in uniform and becoming enforcers of state ideology. The task of protecting property thus falls to everyone else. It is in this way that we are most visibly becoming a low-trust society, reminiscent of the poorer parts of Latin America or Africa.

The rich are retreating into gated communities, hiring security firms, posting sentries (these are especially obvious outside synagogues, which have felt unprotected since anti-Israel protesters were allowed to behave menacingly at their doors while the police looked on). Walls are springing up – including a hideous new fence around Parliament.

In my native Lima, big houses had uniformed watchmen (Latin American Spanish is full of delicious English loanwords, and a security guard is known as a “guachimán”). How long before London goes the same way?

For those who cannot afford their own guachimanes, there is always do-it-yourself enforcement. A news item about a couple who traced their stolen Jaguar through its airtag and stole it back has unleashed an online flood of similar recollections. Always the same story: a car stolen, owners calling police to beg them to intercept it before the thieves found the airtag, the police sitting on their hands, the owners acting themselves.

Private citizens are plugging the gaps left by our crumbling state apparatus. A group of volunteers has been washing graffiti from Tube trains – prompting the extraordinary response that they should have left it to the experts as they might be using the wrong cleaning fluids.

Robert Jenrick, the tireless shadow justice secretary, spent a morning personally confronting fare dodgers, asking them on camera why they felt they should not pay like everyone else. The numpties at Transport for London, sensing that they were being shown up, complained that he had not sought their permission to film on their property.

I happen to believe that lots of things that are badly done by the state could be better done by private individuals. I don’t understand why the Government needs to own and operate London Underground, and there is a strand of libertarian thought that holds that most of the functions of the police should indeed be hived off to private firms.

But we are a million miles away from libertarianism. We have the highest taxes since the 1940s, we have more than tripled the national debt since the turn of the century and we are passing pettifogging laws on everything from the regulation of football to what employers must do to prevent their staff from overhearing the wrong things in the workplace.

It is in this sense that we are most authentically becoming like a developing nation. A Government that aspires to do things that are none of its business simultaneously fails in its core responsibilities – above all, in its duty to provide a functioning justice system that protects property.

How long before we move from confronting people who push through ticket barriers to actual vigilantism? A friend in Islington tells me that his local Co-op recently removed some items from its shelves and put everything else – even food – behind anti-theft locks. It was responding to a spate of aggressive shoplifting that had seen its guachimán beaten up twice.

As word spread, local residents decided to organise a rota of cricket-bat-wielding volunteers to protect the shop. But, Islington being Islington, there were enough lawyers on the local WhatsApp group to point out that the volunteers would end up being arrested.

What a sad decline. Lee Kuan Yew once recalled how, when he was studying law at Cambridge, he had taken the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and had been astonished to see people buying newspapers and leaving the correct price in an honesty box, open to any passer-by.

Such behaviour is now unthinkable in Piccadilly Circus. It might be found in Singapore, which has successfully inculcated in its huge immigrant population a sense of national cohesion. But in Britain, partly because of what Eric Kaufmann calls asymmetric multiculturalism – that is, celebrating minorities while denigrating the majority – any such sense of trust is evaporating.

We are sliding into what used to be called the Third World. And the worst of it is that we don’t seem to care. (THE TELAGRAPHY)