A NEW year, and another wave of shops closures beckons. According to the Centre for Retail Research, 2024 took a terrible toll on the retail workforce, with 170,000 jobs lost. Thirty-eight major chains went bust, including Body Shop, Carpetright and Lloyds Pharmacy. Shoe Zone recently shut more of its cheap footwear shops. WH Smith, once a presence in every town centre, is closing further outlets. Soon we will be left with Turkish barbers, Vietnamese nail bars, charity shops and cafes. Why is the high street – the very heart of our communities – in such serious decline?
Let us consider ten ways in which your town centre is being ruined.
- Parking fees and fines
Councils seem to be going out of their way to deter people from using their town centre or local shopping parades. Not only have parking restrictions expanded, with increasing fees and extortionate fines, but in many towns the payment method has gone digital, requiring use of a parking ‘app’. For the elderly this is a barrier, but councillors don’t care – they have targets to achieve.
- Out-of-town shopping malls
If you think councils are discouraging car use for ‘green’ reasons, ask yourself why those same local authorities have allowed US-style shopping malls to be built outside town centres, with vast car parks.
- Higher costs
Small businesses are less able to absorb the ever-increasing costs of trading: energy bills and higher minimum wage and National Insurance levies, on top of inflated prices for stock. From April 1 2025 the cut in business rate relief will disproportionately penalise independent shops, as they are mostly based in town centres while the chains pay less in the corporate zone of the shopping mall.
- Bank closures
For the considerable number of people who prefer to use cash, the relentless closure of banks makes spending money more awkward. In my town in Sussex, all four major banks have gone in the last three years, leaving an ugly boarded-up vista in the middle of the town. ‘Every day is a bank holiday in Bexhill’, we say.
- Loss of public toilets
Councils are more focused on the contrived climate crisis than provision of basic services. Cutting costs wherever they can, they regard the public lavatory as a throwback to the past – which, as we know, is a different country. Anyone with weakened bladder control, be they old or having a medical condition, may not take the risk. Yes, there are cafes everywhere, but why should citizens be expected to buy a coffee just to spend a penny? Civic responsibility is gone with the wind.
- Charity shops
Small businesses selling clothes or any items that are also available (albeit second-hand) in charity shops are trading at a hefty disadvantage. Some town centres now have more charity shops than conventional shops. In the past the thrift store offered random and unexpected items, with possible bargains, but today everything on the shelves is priced by internet check, and unusual or less popular donations are sent to landfill.
- Soft on shoplifting
The Daily Mail reported a few days ago on Romanian gangs stealing expensive goods to order. But shoplifting is widespread and worsening. In ‘woke’ California theft of anything worth less than a thousand dollars has been decriminalised, and in an unofficial way the same applies here. Shoplifters act brazenly because there are no consequences: even if a case goes to court the accused claims mental health problems or poverty and goes scot-free to do it again. Pity the shopkeeper who tries to intervene and risks being charged with assault, if not being stabbed.
- ‘Apartheid’ pricing and automated tills
Supermarkets have two-tier pricing nowadays: a box of cereal may be priced at £2, but unless you have registered online for a loyalty card you will be charged £3. This pricing policy discriminates against the elderly and anyone concerned about digital surveillance. It’s an ethically dubious practice at odds with the retailer’s self-promotion as an inclusive purveyor. Also alienating to many customers are the electronic tills bearing the oxymoron of ‘self-service’. Going into town was always a social experience as well as a functional pursuit, pleasantries exchanged with shop staff are being replaced by a machine that berates you for putting an ‘unidentified item in the bagging area’. Charming.
- Rapid growth of online shopping
The covid-19 ‘pandemic’ was used to take a giant stride towards the technocratic Great Reset. As a World Economic Forum video showed during the draconian lockdown, in the near future goods will be delivered to us by drone. You will not go out to browse and buy in shops, but order items through the virtual shopping place of the internet. Every Amazon order means another item left on a shop shelf; all those vans delivering parcels to front doors are leading to ‘closing down’ signs in the high street. Like the pub or the church, deserting your town centre is an object lesson of ‘use it or lose it’.
- Gloom
‘This town is becoming like a ghost town’, sang the Coventry band The Specials in 1981. But the recession of the early 1980s is nothing compared to the yawning gaps appearing on our high streets where the likes of Debenhams and Wilko have left vacant premises. The decline has become irreversible, compounding the aforementioned reasons to stay away.
It should by now be obvious that much of this destruction is deliberate. Any human activity is prone to Net Zero puritanism, from driving to shopping to drinking to walking the dog. The concept of the ‘15-minute city’ will result in only the denizens of inner-urban apartment blocks accessing the town centre; others will have to rely on whatever is provided in their district. Society is being atomised for the purpose of totalitarian control, with everything we consume monitored and our movements curtailed.
What can we do about it?
Use local businesses: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. A greengrocer’s produce may not last as long as the preservative-sprayed apples and lettuces from the supermarket, but it will taste better. Milk from local dairies is dearer but much more healthful than the watery, hormone-addled liquid that most people buy. You are what you eat.
Avoid the digitisation of every aspect of life. Reject loyalty cards, which are not really for your benefit but are a data harvesting tool. Insist on human service at the checkout. Independent shops are more likely to welcome cash, and they don’t do two-tier pricing.
Resist the Great Reset wherever and whenever you can. Join a Stand in the Park group (details here) and build a network for social and practical support. And somehow we need to let the asleep know that every time they pay by card or smartphone, or order a meal from Deliveroo, they are putting another brick in the wall of their own digital prison.
