To explain the death of the British high street, I need to tell you about Kathy McCauslin-Cadieux. She ran a boutique in Pennsylvania for 29 years. At its peak, the business grossed $1.5m a year and employed 25 women. Her customers, or “ladies”, as she called them, followed her from jewellery shows and craft fairs to one of the three bricks-and-mortar locations she would go on to open. “I loved making the women who came in feel beautiful,” she told Dana Mattioli, author of The Everything War.
But in 2017, she snapped. After years of declining sales and reduced footfall, a customer came in to her shop. She spent three hours shopping for mother-of-the-bride dresses: choosing the right silhouette, drinking complimentary prosecco, eventually finding the perfect outfit. Then, the pièce de résistance: “I’m going to go online and see if Amazon has it.” McCauslin-Cadieux closed her stores and retired at the end of that holiday season.
The Everything War charts Amazon’s expansion – from glint in Jeff Bezos’s eye to global mega-corporation – “by abusing data, exploiting partners, copying competitors and avoiding taxes”. Mattioli meticulously details the impact on businesses, from sprawling chains such as Toys “R” Us to small businesses like McCauslin-Cadieux’s. To give a sense of scale, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance reports that the number of small retailers in America fell by 65,000 between 2007 and 2017: “About 40 per cent of the nation’s small apparel, toy and sporting-goods makers disappeared, along with about one third of small book-publishers.”
Mattioli’s book has been popping up like molehills in the garden of my mind as Andy Burnham rightly makes revitalising Britain’s high streets a central piece of his governing agenda. People are unhappy about the density of vape shops, barbers’, nail salons and takeaways – as well as the empty units – where they live. Reform UK, and others in their orbit, claim this proliferation is a grand criminal conspiracy of money laundering, tax avoidance and modern slavery perpetrated, chiefly, by foreigners. I’m not so sure.
Of course, Britain’s grey economy – activity that is not taxed or regulated – is real and booming. I don’t seek to minimise it. The BBC’s UK editor, Ed Thomas, has exposed illegal businesses from Bradford to Plymouth. The London-based magazine The Fence investigated a shadow network of American candy stores and souvenir shops and found opaque finances, likely tax evasion, and a rotating cast of Afghan directors. The National Crime Agency recently raided 2,734 premises and arrested 924 people as part of Operation Machinize 2, targeting the criminal exploitation of high street businesses.
HMRC estimates that about 9 per cent of UK adults participated in the grey economy in 2022. That’s around 4.4 million people. It’s believed there are up to 900,000 undocumented migrants in the UK without the right to work, and a further 224,000 asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their claim. Plainly, even if every single one of these people was working illegally, they would make up only a quarter of the hidden economy total. Yes, it’s a big bit of our economy; no, it is not dominated by illegal workers.
But that is less politically useful to people like Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, who, at a press conference in 2024 to launch his party’s immigration policy, singled out barbershops as hotbeds of illegality. In August this year, Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesperson, made a social media video about “dodgy Turkish barbers’”.
The number of barbershops in Britain has multiplied several times over since 2015. The trade is a useful example of a broader problem. The hardware shop, the furniture shop, the clothes shop – like that owned by Kathy McCauslin-Cadieux – cannot compete with a global corporation prepared to run products as loss leaders, covering the costs with its highly lucrative web-services business, in order to dominate the market. Right now, barbers can: Amazon is yet to figure out the economics of robot haircuts. (Although there’s time yet – the company opened a salon in London’s Spitalfields Market in 2021.)
Barbers have no licensing requirements, no stock, no energy-intensive kitchens. They are lean operations, the kind that can survive in an environment of brutal energy costs and business rates. If anyone can make it right now, it’s them. Their proliferation is the market in action. Add in the fact that male hairstyles have changed – a fade requires more regular upkeep, for example – and we are where we are.
According to HMRC, the most commonly purchased goods or services in the hidden economy fall into the category of general household maintenance, making up 35 per cent of all activity. Part of the story of Britain’s declining high streets is highly visible law-breaking, but this is not the most prevalent grey activity. What’s more likely: that Britain’s many barber shops are part of a grand criminal, money-laundering conspiracy, as the right would have you believe? Or that barbershops are some of the only premises able to prosper in the current environment? Maybe the answer has shades of grey. But that wouldn’t be as politically useful, would it?
[Further reading: Britain must stop paying benefits to millionaires]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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Subscribe here to commentThe failure to reform taxation as fundamentally as the economy has changed must be part of the problem. Online sales attract less tax than high street sales. Wealth attracts less tax than income. Council tax persists, regressively, in spite of being intriduced as a panic response in the early 1990s as a result of protests at the even more regressive poll tax that marked Margaret Thatcher’s nemesis.
Interesting article, but omits the trend – that the proportion of those in what HMRC calls the Hidden Economy is increasing, at a substantial rate. The original Hidden Economy report of 2016 estimated those involved comprised 4.4% of the adult population, while the report of 2023 produced a figure of 8.9%. So, to add to the burden on the Treasury of increasing interest rates, there’s a reduction, in a stagnating economy, of the coverage of taxation on the economy.