THE WEEK

Sixteen years ago, I wrote in this space about a report arguing that supermarkets were driving local shops and services out of business so fast that Britain would soon become a country “of ghost towns and villages”. Somehow, the high street survived, though not as dominant as it once was and by no means everywhere. But will it survive what The Times columnist Iain Martin calls “the wrecking ball” of Amazon? Now, as he says, even high streets in affluent boroughs are “pockmarked” with vacant sites and temporary bargain stores selling tat for a few weeks before moving on. And every empty shop, every hollowed out high street, is a “win” for online retail giants such as Amazon.

It is extraordinary to see a sitting US president continually attacking an American company ( see p16), but it’s hard to deny Donald Trump’s claim that Amazon has put “many thousands of retailers out of business”. How will it all end? In The Daily Telegraph, Michael Deacon imagined looking back one day at the “gloriously democratic” internet age: how it enabled, for the first time, “rabid antiSemites, Stalin apologists and white supremacists” to build “enormous followings of the vulnerable, angry and ill-informed” – and at how successful it was at destroying jobs, “killing the music industry, closing every magazine and newspaper on Earth, and concentrating 98% of the world’s wealth among a handful of sociopaths in California”. Well, happily we’re not there

Jolyon Connell yet. But if we consumers don’t change our habits, one day we may be.