I notice you're a fellow Londoner, so here's my take on your comment from the perspective of someone who is a hiring manager and thus has had the displeasure of

I notice you're a fellow Londoner, so here's my take on your comment from the perspective of someone who is a hiring manager and thus has had the displeasure of dismissing staff: Even if that is a sackable offence where you work (which I'm highly sceptical about), that would still be breaking UK employment laws and thus the terminated employee would have grounds for unfair dismissal. This is even taking into account how sensitive to discrimination our employment laws are. Usually what happens when employees are fired over seemingly trivial things, they already have a string of misnomers on file and really the trivial occurrence is the "final strike" (to use a baseball metaphor).