Late last week, accompanied by journalists, police in the south and west of England launched a series of raids on ‘Turkish-style’ barber shops. Cash, drugs and counterfeit goods were seized, and arrests made on various charges, including immigration offences. Many of those caught on these premises are suspected of being linked to Albanian or Kurdish organised crime gangs.
This follows a wider pattern on the British high street, where ‘Turkish’ barbers, vape shops and even ‘American candy stores’ now proliferate. Amid the filth and £1 discount stores (‘pound shops’) when physical retail is in decline—dragging down blighted town centres—certain enterprises look like a runaway success story .
Yet locals complain at being ‘overrun’ by the Turkish-style barber shops, For instance, Porth (pop. 6,000) in the Rhondda Valley expects the total number to rise from five to 13 such venues, all within a six-minute walk of each other (and on top of the town’s existing seven non-’Turkish-style’ salons).
For several years, many have suspected there was a sinister explanation for the explosive growth of these new businesses. Some get called ‘racist’ for voicing their concerns, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
In recent years, the British high street has suffered from a sequence of body-blows, including competition from out-of-town retail parks and supermarkets, online shopping, pandemic restrictions and anti-car town planning. Last year one of our contributors noted
In every town across the UK, streets are now lined with vaping shops and Turkish barbers, which are widely believed to be fronts for money laundering operations.
It appears that the hundreds of new businesses repopulating empty shops are now bringing new social problems. Maybe these raids show the British authorities finally waking up to the threat.
