This week’s riots across the UK weren’t just an attack on our cities. They were an attack on retail. Retailers have been in the front line of sickening theft and violence on an industrial scale.

This week’s riots across the UK weren’t just an attack on our cities. They were an attack on retail. Retailers have been in the front line of sickening theft and violence on an industrial scale.

Broadcasters have been showing images of stores being broken into, and highlighting tragic cases of proud independent retailers having their businesses destroyed. But what they’ve failed to do is understand that multiple retailers too aren’t faceless corporations – they’re organisations that rely on ordinary people, who have been subject to terrifying ordeals of a type no person should ever have to endure.

There have been stories of staff locking themselves in stock rooms to escape the looters, only to find themselves trapped, terrified that the building was going to be burnt down. If we saw pictures of this happening in Mogadishu or Tripoli we would be shocked. But this is London. This is Birmingham. This is Manchester.

There can barely be a multiple retailer unaffected by this week’s events, and those retailers I’ve spoken to are angry and feel let down. There will be a financial cost, a massive one, but the human cost is even greater.

It is clear that while many individual police officers displayed immense courage, the response to this week’s terror was too slow and, when it came, insufficiently robust. Retailers pay handsomely for the emergency services but at the very time they were most needed they were let down.

The police have been rendered impotent, and as retailers have been saying on the pages of Retail Week for years, we have a culture in the police where crime against business doesn’t matter.

Talk to an independent retailer or a store manager from a multiple retailer in any inner city area. They will tell you that low-level crime and anti-social behaviour is routinely tolerated, and that the police response is feeble if not non-existent.

Is it therefore any wonder that a culture has been created where a generation of youths believe they have a right to whatever they want without paying for it? Retailers have got their product offers right – but these people have no sense that they have to work to pay for them.

Make no mistake – there weren’t dozens or hundreds of people doing this. It was thousands, and finding answers isn’t helped by our totally out-of-touch media and political elites seeking excuses for theft and violence for which there can be no excuse. It’s as simple as that.

But we are where we are. Home Secretary Theresa May made the right noises when she met with the BRC and ACS on Tuesday afternoon – she could hardly have done anything else – yet there were still massive problems in Manchester and Birmingham that evening.

This week’s turmoil will pass. Normality will return. But a repeat of the horrific scenes cannot be allowed to happen. The pursuit of the culprits must be unrelenting, the sentencing draconian – whatever their age. The culprits have no moral compass – they need to be taught one.

The policymakers need to do this if only because their high streets need retail more than retail needs them. I write this with no pleasure – seeing the streets where I spent much of my childhood around Rye Lane in Peckham destroyed this week has been utterly depressing.

But the reality is that most multiple retailers no longer need to be in Peckham, Tottenham or Wood Green. In the decade after trouble flared in south London in the 1980s, Marks & Spencer, Bhs and Sainsbury’s all left Peckham. The giant department store that dominated the town closed.

If you were Carpetright, Currys or Comet would you rather rebuild in Tottenham, or instead spend the money on improving your website? There are no shrinkage problems or thuggish louts in cyberspace.

In the multichannel age it’s a no-brainer. That’s tough on the staff – and on the independent retailers left behind – but who could blame retailers if they feel they can’t be bothered to take the risk?

Where now for retail?

While Retail Week is a title that caters primarily for the multiple retail fraternity, this is a time when the retail industry needs to stand strong, as one. The plight of 150-year-old Croydon furniture retailer Reeves is heartbreaking, but there will be many independents in a similar situation, many of them lacking sufficient insurance to get back up and running.

There needs to be help for retailers to get back on their feet. Insurance and credit will be key. But how about some more imaginative solutions, such as rates holidays to tempt businesses back to the affected areas? Local councils will need to throw the shackles of political correctness aside and demonstrate business matters to them – how about scrapping all parking charges to get people to shop locally?

Fundamentally though, retailers and shoppers need to get their confidence back. There has to be a sustained crackdown on crime and anti-social behaviour. Retailers deserve aggressive policing not just for one night, but every night. Trading was hard enough before this; we need to know that the system is on retail’s side.

There is a cruel irony that retailers do more for the UK’s cities than anyone else. In some cases that’s direct. Through his massive investment in new schools, Phil Harris has done more to give the kids of south London a chance in life than any other individual. Charles Dunstone is passionately committed to the Prince’s Trust, which he chairs.

But more widely, through creating jobs and rates revenue, retail is the glue that holds our cities together. It’s now time retail got something back. This week will not crush our wonderful industry’s spirit. In the difficult days ahead, let’s all speak up for retail.