How complacency over demise of high streets is driving voters towards Reform UK

This is brain-dead politics in practice. Promises of reform are followed by abject avoidance of trying something different. Good businesses – shops, bars, restaurants – are pushed over the edge. It’s happening again now, all over Scotland.

For many people, boarded up premises are a highly visible symbol of decline in their communities. But what can they do? According to new research, part of the answer may be that they vote Reform – which just might shake policymakers out of inertia.

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Not just about migration

According to the latest Holyrood poll, one-in-five Scottish voters will support Mr Farage and his motley band of Braverman, Jenrick and and Zahawi. UK-wide, the figure is closer to one in three and there is not yet evidence of it receding. There must be reasons.

It is complacent to pretend that anti-immigrant sentiment alone is the recruiting sergeant for Reform voters, many of whom would not have identified themselves as Tories, never mind anything further to the right, or even as Brexit enthusiasts.

Sometimes political answers are, almost literally, on our doorsteps if we choose to look. Research by Southampton University, published this week, suggests that the dismal state of town centres is now one of the biggest drivers of votes towards Reform.

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They have become a symbol of what the researchers delicately describe as “place-based resentment”. The shabbier the high street, the stronger the rise of Reform.

From a lofty height, commentators may marvel at the irrationality. What are Jenrick, Braverman or indeed Lord Offord going to do as Reformers that didn’t occur to them as Tories in 15 years? This misses the point that unhappiness does not necessarily express itself through rationality.

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Derelict sites a bigger issue than polar ice-caps

I was reminded of another polling exercise a few years ago in which some green group asked the public to prioritise environmental issues which concerned them. This was expected to confirm the scale of public angst about climate change and other high level preoccupations.

To their disappointment, the results told them that the “environment” which most respondents prioritised was the one in which they lived. Dirty streets, derelict land and – yes – boarded up shopping centres topped the list, rather than melting ice-caps in Antarctica. Maybe governments should have listened.

My only dissent from the Southampton University analysis was with their over-emphasis on “post-Covid” behaviour and the rise in online shopping to explain high street decline. Both are, of course, significant factors but the process started long before Covid or even Amazon.

How do other countries do it?

In the late 1990s, as a minister in the pre-devolution Scottish Office, I tried to advance a modest idea for a starting-point in addressing it. The evidence of hollowed-out town centres in my constituency was powerful and I knew how morale-sapping it was for people who lived in these places and had seen them in much better days.

I didn’t claim to have the solution but I had travelled enough in Europe to be certain there must be one. My idea was to take a few exemplar locations in Scotland – maybe a coastal resort, a post-industrial town, a run-down city suburb – and match them to equivalents in countries which suffer nothing like the same malaise.

What were the conditions in these places which allowed small shops, bars and restaurants, as well as larger retailers, to flourish? A forensic study would surely have yielded answers which could then be applied to our own depressed communities, to see how they worked.

Needless to say, this did not enthuse civil servants, who rightly feared that the answers would be disruptive to established methods. That, indeed, would have been the whole point of the exercise. But all ministers move on and, in due course, my modest proposal moved with me, into oblivion though I’ve never forgotten it.

Last week, I was in Italy and was reminded yet again that there are alternatives to the dreary assumption that “decline of the high street” is just a fact of life that has to be tholed. So let’s press on with another rates revaluation and create even more retail and hospitality havoc.

Throw out the rulebook

Without doubt, these obtuse calculations of business rates will seal the fate of many good places which provide livelihoods, services and economic activity. More empty shops. Fewer cafes or bars. Regardless of past experience, they just keep doing the same thing.

There are always piecemeal initiatives but these are never backed up by the political courage to recognise the need for an entirely different mentality. Throw the valuation rulebook out the window and then emulate best practice elsewhere in order to incentivise creativity and entrepreneurism, instead of charity shops, vape emporia and voids.

The Southampton University survey highlighted the political threat of this issue to Labour in England and Wales; unfair perhaps as at least they are trying to do something about it after 15 Tory years. But when was politics fair?

In Scotland, we have had the same people in power for 18 years. It is exactly the kind of policy area where freedom to pursue radically different policies has been entirely within Edinburgh’s gift. Yet not a finger has been lifted, other than to trigger another non-domestic rates revaluation, in full knowledge of what it will lead to.

Small wonder that Reform have alighted upon an issue which symbolises the grievances of ‘left behind’ communities. In Scotland, however, the irony of voting Reform is that it will actually reform nothing while assisting those whose only offer is more of the same.