WHILE self-indulgent MPs prance for the media about how their consciences won’t let them fight for the party or the manifesto they were elected to fight for, there’s a crisis on our high streets.

We’ve grown used to the collapse of household-name firms like Woolworths, Toys R Us and Maplin and the decimation of previously common outlets from House of Fraser to Debenham’s. Remaining firms from Tesco to M&S are shutting stores and cutting jobs.

An unreconstructed politics has no answers to the death of the high street. Just as the prophets of globalisation claimed there was no alternative to “flexible” contracts — job insecurity — and the shift of manufacturing abroad, complacent Tories blame the loss of retail jobs on unstoppable trends such as online shopping. But as with every sector from transport to the Post Office the real culprit is the short-termism and myopic lack of ideas typical of modern British capitalism. The need for high street shops is still there. It’s our political and business leaders who are failing to respond.

That’s why retail union Usdaw will take to the streets for its Save Our Shops campaign. General secretary Paddy Lillis, who took the helm last year of one of the country’s biggest trade unions, is calling for a serious conversation about saving the high street and for “national and local government, unions and employers to form a joint retail task group.

“We need a longer term strategy for retail,” he tells me when we meet in the union’s Manchester headquarters. “Online versus bricks and mortar. We need to look at high rents and high business rates, but more than that, at automation and its effect on workers, at pay and its effect on workers’ ability to spend, at online sales taxes and car park charges.

“At the moment you have a downward spiral. When shops close it has a knock-on effect. There are fewer people in town to buy from other shops and there are fewer reasons to go shopping on the high street.

“Retail is one of the drivers of the economy. It employs three million people, more than manufacturing or construction. But people don’t take it seriously. If the crisis currently taking place in retail were taking place in manufacturing there would be a political outcry.”

Making headway on the issue depends on broadening the political perspective, Lillis believes. “All the indications are people still want to go to shops. Towns and cities need to be community hubs as well.

“But look at [High Streets Minister] Jake Berry’s high street task force. The only people on it are CEOs. They are only interested in profit — not what happens to the employee. I’ve written to him about that.

“It’s the same story with the Competition and Markets Authority. There isn’t a single employee rep. All it’s interested in are profit margins. The authority needs fundamental change. I’ve raised that with Labour’s shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey and she supports us. We’re calling a roundtable discussion in Parliament in June.”

As the children demonstrating for a strategy to combat climate change can attest, “business as usual” is cutting the ground from under its own feet across the board. Business chiefs’ focus is narrow and selfish: maximisation of short-term profit and dividends has killed giant companies such as Carillion and left their workers and customers high and dry. Britain’s low-pay epidemic is a key causal factor in the death of the high street.

Usdaw highlights the issue with its Time for Better Pay campaign. “We have record levels of in-work poverty,” Lillis points out. “You have people on short-hours contracts who can’t get more hours. In retail you have people on 15-hour contracts who might normally work much longer than that — 25 or 35 hours.” Workers are denied better contracts so bosses can add or reduce hours at will and this can also be used to bully staff and prevent them from calling out poor treatment.

The union is calling for contracts to reflect the average hours worked over a 12-week period. Its Time for Better Pay petition was the fastest growing in the country last month and Lillis is pleased the TUC and Labour Party have adopted a £10 an hour minimum wage as policy. “We’re throwing ourselves into Labour,” he says, aware a serious political shake-up is essential if the problems besetting ordinary workers are to be addressed. “A petition is the start. But we need to make this a workplace campaign.

“We’re building teams up now for the election. Whenever an election comes, if it is next month or next year, the labour movement must be ready.

“The Trade Union Act was an attempt to silence us. They don’t want unions to be political and that’s why they tried to make it harder for us to have political funds.

“But the political fund is about campaigning. We’re extremely successful in convincing members to support it — 86 per cent sign up. We talk to activists about what it is about. You’re often asked, “is that just giving money to Labour?” We explain we are a Labour-affiliated union yes, but the main use of the political fund is to provide resources for campaigns like Time for Better Pay.”

There are other political campaigns Usdaw undertakes to protect shop workers, such as Freedom from Fear. “Everyone should have the right to go to work without being attacked or abused. Every day 260 retail workers are assaulted. Flashpoints include when you are required by law to check ID if you suspect someone is underage, for example.

“If you serve someone underage it’s the retail worker and not the employer who gets a criminal record. But if government wants shop workers to police the law in that way it should protect them. As is the case for emergency service workers, there should be tougher sentences for people who assault shop workers doing their jobs.”

He’s highly critical of Tory legislation withdrawing recovery of legal costs for small claims damages from road traffic accident, employer and public liability claims. “Pushing people out of claiming has a negative effect on health and safety. Bad employers know that they’re less likely to be challenged.” Labour has fought against the legislation in the Commons, but while it remains in opposition there’s only so much it can do. “Come the election we’ll call them out,” Lillis says firmly. “Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell understand this stuff. They know how important it is.”

Lillis, a union member all his adult life having started out as a rep in a Northern Ireland abattoir, is no novice when it comes to Labour politics. He has been on the party’s national executive for 14 years. He chaired it in 2016, the year of the “chicken coup” and one he remembers as full of “bitterness and recrimination.” But his conviction is that the labour movement must rise above the sniping and go on the offensive.

“The trade union movement has been declining for 20 years,” he says. “We need to focus on recruitment. And Usdaw is doing well on recruitment. In fact 2017-18 was our highest new membership count ever, with 93,125 new members.

“We have agreements with the ‘big four,’ Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s and the Co-op. Access to inductions, which means you can directly speak to people, say ‘don’t you want your pay and conditions negotiated by an independent union?’ People do join. The people who don’t join are the people nobody can talk to, which is why we are always challenging those non-union employers like M&S, Lidl, B&Q.”

Crucial to recruitment is nurturing the union’s most important resource, its reps. “We have just 105 field officials but nearly 10,000 workplace activists,” he tells me. “In 2012 we launched a rep development programme. In a handful of unions you’ll find there are 300 different ways to deal with a new rep. We have to be more organised.

“Within four weeks of being elected a rep now you will have a full-time official sit down with you. We ask what they want from us and let them know what we want from them. We need to keep our reps. A high turnover — and we had 27 per cent turnover a year — isn’t good as you need people who are experienced and capable of dealing with problems in the workplace.

“We need to empower reps, have reps who can stand up to the boss. We’ll be reviewing our education programme over the next six months. Treat the reps properly — they’re the heart of everything we do as a union.

“Sixteen years ago we launched the organising academy. Now you have a hundred lay people undergoing six months’ training on how to go into the convenience sector and organise. Some go on to an even more intensive course, looking at disciplinaries, grievance, advocacy.”

That organising goes hand in hand with political organising. “We’re starting a political activism course. People in retail don’t think they could be councillors or MPs. But they’re as bright and sharp as anyone else.

“Unions can tell people: ‘You’re better than you think you are. You’re better than quite a lot of people who are currently councillors or MPs.’ And that way, we can secure the future of our movement.”

Labour’s leadership is promising transformative change in this country. But it will be workplace and community organisation on the ground that delivers it. Lillis is convinced that our movement has the strength and potential to do just that.

Paddy Lillis is general secretary of Usdaw