How can we stop this ‘carry on regardless’ culture?

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You’d be forgiven recently for believing we’d been transported back to the early 1940s.

Austerity is on everyone’s lips, there’s panic on the stock markets and unrest around the world, including the UK.

The latter provided us with the merest hint of the Blitz experience as we all waited anxiously to see which city would be hit tonight and would look like the proverbial bombsite in the morning.

I’ve also noticed a revival of the old ‘Keep calm and carry on’ motto, presumably a homage to the last time we were ‘all in it together’.

Unfortunately though, the only signs of Dunkirk spirit have come from the retailers and local residents clearing up the devastation none of us ever expected to see on the streets of the UK in the 21st century.

There’s a fair bit of ‘carrying on’ though and a swathe of high-profile retail failures apparently hasn’t dented the image of shopkeepers as amaranthine cash cows.

Landlords carry on expecting rising rents, but claim more flexibility on lease terms. As a concession largely wrung out of them at the 11th hour, it’s already past its sell by date. What’s needed urgently is common-sense rents – most retailers want to make a living from their stores, not walk away from them.

Councils carry on deterring shoppers with exorbitant parking fees and central government continues to ignore the fact that high business rates and tax increases are unsustainable in a climate of falling consumer confidence and squeezed margins – even though the rebates offered to victims of looting suggest they know how damaging they are. Meanwhile, the minimum wage moves inexorably northward and next year we have to pay compulsory pension contributions too.

So how can we stop this ‘carry on regardless’ culture? Perhaps Mary Portas’ report on the high street will help, and if rumours are true it promises to be hard-hitting on these issues.

Let’s hope it isn’t as superficial as Chamberlain’s fluttering piece of paper turned out to be. Otherwise I fear that for many more in the trenches, it could ‘all be over by Christmas’.