A multi-million-pound police task force will be established to target the rapidly proliferating blight of “dodgy” storefronts, such as barber shops and vape stores, linked to migrant criminal gangs and black-market money laundering.
The decline associated with multiculturalism has perhaps been best typified across Britain by the proliferation of cash businesses scooping up real estate on the high street, creating a novel form of economic blight across the country, as small mom-and-pop operations and empty stores gave been taken up out and replaced with extractive entities often serving foreign interests, colloquially referred to as “Turkish”.
While the liberal legacy media and establishment politicians previously sought to flatly deny the existence of such shops or downplay concerns over the physical manifestation of the changes imposed by mass migration against the will of the public, the Home Office announced on Tuesday a £30 ($40) million crackdown targeting the use of illegal migrants, money laundering, and tax evasion schemes deployed by “dodgy shops”.
“Organised crime gangs operating across Britain’s high streets will be hit with a major police offensive in a new nationwide crackdown on dodgy shops,” the Home Office said in a statement. “Rogue barber shops, vape stores, mini-marts and sweet shops linked to organised crime will face raids, closures and cash seizures.”
The government said that 75 police officers will be recruited from the Essex Police, Greater Manchester Police, Kent Police, West Midlands Police, and the National Crime Agency (NCA) to form a specialised unit to confront the scourge. Trading Standards consumer watchdogs will receive £6 million in new funding to uncover “sham businesses” and to train officers in identifying “suspicious businesses, strengthen business compliance, and boost enforcement.”
The NCA estimated that of the £12 billion-plus in criminal cash generated every year in Britain, around £1 billion is laundered through “dodgy” high street businesses. The UK’s top domestic law enforcement agency added that some of those same businesses are also tied to the selling of counterfeit goods, the hiring of illegal migrants, the illegal drug trade, and tax evasion.
The Home Office said that it expects thousands of premises to be raided, hundreds of people to be arrested, and millions in cash to be seized. It said that a previous, smaller operation against such businesses resulted in 2,734 premises being visited and raided, 924 people arrested, and over £13 million of suspected criminal proceeds seized or restrained.
The extra funding for trading standards officers who protect consumers may be critical, given trading standards officers have recently reported death threats and even sexual assault against them from migrant crime gangs for doing their jobs by investigating these fake businesses.
The issue has long been raised by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who said last year that the criminal operations have been going on for years on an “industrial scale… It’s money laundering, it’s a way of funnelling large amounts of cash through, declare some of it to the taxman, and of course, the drugs trade is all cash.”
Earlier this year, Mr Farage produced a vox pop video for his social media platforms after finding a “non-Turkish” barber shop on a high street.
“We actually found a barber shop that doesn’t have a Turkish sign out front, that actually has customers, and there’s no Lamborghini out back. Isn’t that unusual in modern Britain?”
For discussing the issue, the Labour government’s devolution, faith and communities minister Miatta Fahnbulleh accused Mr Farage of engaging in “dog-whistle racism” and the “politics of grievance”, even though accepting this problem is real is now government policy just months later.
“They blame people of difference rather than deal with the fundamentals… The fundamentals aren’t to do with the colour of the skin of people running our high streets. It’s to do with long-term decline and neglect,” the government minister said at the time.
Indeed, those claims are now at odds with the position of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who expressed similar sentiments to Farage.
“Criminal gangs have exploited our high streets to launder their dirty money and undercut honest businesses,” she said on Tuesday. “We are hitting back with a nationwide crackdown to shut these fronts down, seize dirty cash and drive organised crime off our high streets and put bosses behind bars.”