How Britain's high street decline is fuelling Reform UK's rise: 'There's a sense that politics has failed'

The obituary of the high street has been written many times.

It’s little wonder: across the country, boarded up windows, ‘everything must go’ signs and vandalised awnings have long been common sights. Meanwhile the right-wing party Reform UK is surging in the polls.

This is no coincidence, new research has found – declining high streets fuel populism.

According to a new Imperial College London study, there is a “significant positive association” between high street vacancy rates and support for right-wing populist parties.

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“It’s the bit of the economy that’s obvious to people,” said Prashant Garg, author of the research and an academic at Imperial.

“Perhaps as an economist, I may see [GDP stats] a lot, but people on the street… what they see is what’s on the street.” 

Analysing data on 83,000 empty high street units across 197 towns in England and Wales, Garg and his team found that visible economic decay, not abstract economic indicators, drives support for populist parties.

“When things are visibly bad… we find that every percentage point of these vacancies leads to roughly 0.2% of UKIP – or now Reform – support.” 

While his study focuses on the period between 2010 and 2019, Garg believes its conclusions still apply. “Populism is constant,” he added. 

The correlation between poverty and populism is well established: Reform stands to gain most electorally in towns with poor rates of social mobility, research shows.

However, this new study is specifically about the optics of decline. The researchers controlled for general economic factors, focusing their report on high street vacancies specifically over broader trends of deprivation.

“We are not saying that actual local decline is causing populism, though that is linked, but more looking at the perceptions of local decline,’ Garg explained to Big Issue.

“It could be a place where the economy is strong but… the structural transformation is happening from physical to less physical.”

You might have an area where people are relatively affluent, he continued, but the high street is struggling because a lot of people work from home.

For many voters, a boarded up high street creates a ubiquitous sense of decline and failure. Reform, for example, have tied their plan to save the high street in with their far-right rhetoric around immigration.

“Let’s be honest – the current state of our high streets is not acceptable. Politicians just don’t seem to care,” Reform MP Rupert Lowe said earlier this year – while leader Nigel Farage posted a video declaring “I found a high street barber who isn’t Turkish!”

Parties like Reform channel grievances into political narratives that target perceived “outsider” groups – regardless of the reality.

A growing body of research is developing on this very topic. In March, the think tank Power to Change found that Reform was more likely to have come in second place in the general election in seats that have seen the greatest decline in the high street in recent years.

The party came second in nearly a quarter (24%) of constituencies covered by the High Street Warning Lights indicator, list of the places in England with the greatest increase in persistent high street vacancy rates between 2015 and 2023. The rest of the country tallied just 14%.

“There is a sense that politics has failed us,” Garg said, “and you’re reminded of that every time you see a pothole, or a boarded-up shop.” 

“[Right-wing parties] find someone to blame, for example, immigrants. What we find is that immigrants are not really correlated with these local high street vacancies. So places with more immigrants tend to not have more vacancies. So the immigrant story is not really there, but this is what people exploit.”

What can politicians do about the decline of the high street?

According to the Centre for Cities, the term ‘high street’ has been mentioned more than 3,300 times in the House of Commons and House of Lords over the last five years.

But not all high streets are created equal. In the centre of London and Cambridge, one in 12 high street units is empty. But in central Newport and Bradford it is more than double this number, with close to one in five shops empty.

High street success is, unsurprisingly, linked to the average income in an area. People on higher salaries have more to spend, explains Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities.

“Not all high streets are in trouble. And I think that is the general perception is that all high streets are struggling, whereas, in reality, actually, some are doing quite well,” he said.

“The reasons driving that is because there is money in people’s pockets to go out and spend in a place like London or Edinburgh or York, for example, whereas in a place like Newport or Wakefield, people have got much less money to spend because the economy is weak.”

In these more affluent areas, the high street has been able to adapt, offering experiences – say, sitting and having a coffee – over traditional retail.

To counter decline, Swinney urges, the government must invest in infrastructure and economic growth in major cities like Manchester and Leeds. This economic growth can then spread to surrounding areas that currently feel “left-behind”.

Only such “long term structural changes”, Garg agrees, can help the high street. But when it comes to staving off the far right, short term impacts matter too.

“Incentivizing the reoccupying [of vacancies] as soon as possible” is one idea, he continued. So too, is very simple stuff, like art in windows.

“If you’ve got scaffolding or something, you can at least make it look good. Commission some art. These are very short-term solutions, of course. And if you have some murals or something on that, at least it doesn’t look the area is declining.”

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