Someone's having a laugh at our expense!
Have you noticed the number of so-called Turkish barbers on your local high street? You add to that nail bars and hand car washes. How is it possible that these businesses are flourishing whilst other retail outlets are suffering and closing up?
It is the phenomena of Turkish barbers that is the most obvious. In 2023 the UK witnessed the opening of 2,300 new barber shops on the high street making it the fastest growing sector of the retail economy. This rapid growth continued in to 2024, so that by the end of that year another 665 barbers opened up. There are now an estimated 19,000 barbers on the UK’s high street with even some small towns boasting as many as twenty.
Many of these new barbers style themselves as Turkish, but are often Kurdish or Albanian. What is striking is the observable fact that many of these ‘Turkish’ barber shops are not busy. Local residents often pass comment that the barber shops appear devoid of customers. Instead there will usually be one or two staff, usually young bearded males, lounging around on chairs and playing games on their mobile phones to while away the time.
In the small market town I live in, there are six Turkish barbers for a population of just over 5000. Given around 50% of the town’s population is male and therefore supposedly possible customers, that’s one ‘Turkish’ barbers for every 416 males. But the pool of potential customers must be even less than that. Firstly some men won’t use a hairdresser, preferring a home cut by a wife or partner or going for a haircut out of town, perhaps where they work. On top of that some of the recorded male population will be babies and very small infants not needing a visit to the barber. Not only that, but these new ‘Turkish’ barbers face competition from existing, long-standing barbers of which there are two in my town.
So how do these ’Turkish’ barbers survive? They have to pay high street rates, rent or mortgage, insurance, heating, electricity, wages and taxes on profits etc. The kitting out of the shops must be costly. Each of the (usually) gold barber chairs cost anywhere from £800 to £1000 each and there’s usually at least six. There’s mirrors, fancy plumbing, fancy lighting, fancy flooring and so on. It cannot be cheap to equip a new barbers. How on earth can the return begin to pay back this investment? How too, do the owners of these barbers afford the swanky top-end cars they roll up in?
Aside from the occasional customer to one of these Turkish barber shops I have witnessed another kind of visitor who stand out on account of their ethnicity and depressed demeanour. Some look like they could be Albanian, Afghanistan or Somalia. The ones I have seen enter the shop, have a brief chat with the barber and leave shortly afterwards. On the couple of occasions I have ended up walking behind them on a dog walk you could not fail to register the over-powering stink of weed. It seems likely to me that some of these barbers shops are distribution points for weed in our town and probably elsewhere.
These visitors to the barbers always look downtrodden and aimless, it’s difficult not to feel sorry for them, even if they are, as I suspect, illegal immigrants. However, there’s a limit to how sorry you can feel for them if they are here illegally. They are just a burden on the taxpayer. There’s a worry too that these young men start to resent their lack of prospects, not just in terms of well-paying jobs, but also at the lack of suitable and available young women as partners. Frustration can lead to anger and eventually dangerous outcomes.
What surprised me more, was where these individuals went. As you walk out of the main town centre there are a number of crummy shops, long closed and disused. Many have blacked out windows or netting across the former shop-fronts. Like most people I had stopped noticing these old business premises and just walked past with my dog. When these people stopped at these empty shops and entered through dilapidated doors either into the shop itself or to a secured side alley, I realised the premises were now inhabited and the truth dawned on me. These old shops, both the downstairs shop and the upstairs were now being used to house people, almost certainly recently arrived immigrants.
Who is renting these premises out and how? There is no way these former shops or overhead flats can meet the standards required to rent out in terms safety, insulation and heating as required by legislation. So who is renting them out and why are immigrants living in them? A little searching on the internet and I found a possible answer. I asked myself are the immigrants living there actually modern day slaves that are tasked with running cannabis farms?
It turns out that this is exactly what is going on in old shops, houses and industrial units across our towns and cities. They have been rented by so-called Organised Crime Groups (OSG’s), usually Albanian and turned into cannabis farms. Apparently in Scotland, one Organised Crime Group (OSG) set up a cannabis operation inside an old TSB Bank branch building on a Glasgow high street.
In Neath, Wales, a disused shop was used as a cannabis farm. Police searched the building and found hundreds of cannabis plants at various stages of maturity along with fans and air filters, lights, bottles of plant food, tools, and already-harvested cannabis. Three rooms in the building were lined with plastic sheeting and had their windows blacked out and were being used as “grow rooms”, while a fourth room was being used as living quarters with beds and a TV. The list goes on and on and it appears the Albanian OSG’s are now favouring smaller towns and even villages outside the cities.
It’s going on across the whole of the UK. Albanians in Galashiels were convicted of running a £1 million cannabis farm operation out of an old Woolworths in December 2024. There was another ‘farm’ operated at a closed down bookmakers. Another random example is the arrest of an Albanian in Darlington involved in mass cannabis production in a house just this month. Albanian in Great Yarmouth were arrested for running a cannabis farm out of an old museum in September 2024.
In Leamington Spa, an Albanian man looked after a cannabis factory that had been set up in a house to pay back the £17,000 cost of being smuggled into the country. This seems to the way it works. Illegal immigrants are smuggled in on boats and trucks and then put to work to pay-off their fees to the smugglers. They are little more than slaves, living in squalid conditions in houses, shops and industrial units, forced to tend to the cannabis plants. This begs the question as to what are our authorities doing about this weird state of affairs. In terms of the barbers shops why aren’t the police raiding these premises? They appear to know many of the barbers are front operations for drug proceeds.
Ali Hassan Ali a former Metropolitan Police officer said: “Right across High Streets we have seen a boom in barbers opening up since the pandemic. A lot of these shops have thousands of pounds of equipment but no customers.
While in some cases the shops will be involved in legitimate business, from my own experience, there is strong reason to believe a large number, particularly those owned by Albanians, Turks and Kurds, have links to organised crime. ‘This can be people-smuggling and in some cases drugs.”
It’s not just ’Turkish’ barbers but many nail bars, vape shops and car washes that act as laundering points. And slave trafficking. In Wiltshire Detective Superintendent Charlotte Tucker was behind Britain’s first child modern slavery prosecution. This involved an investigation into the forced labour of trafficked Vietnamese teenagers at nail salons in Bath and Burton-on-Trent and resulted in three convictions. They were forced to work 60-hour weeks for little or no pay.
Justine Carter, director of anti-slavery charity Unseen confirms its nail bars, Car washes and barbers that are the criminals favourite fronts for laundering profits from people trafficking and drugs. “Drug activity, money laundering, wider corruption – it’s happening behind what’s perceived to be a legitimate high street business on your doorstep, clouding quite a lot of criminal activity, including exploitation of workers.”
The police are supposedly asking the public for help in identifying dodgy businesses. DS Tucker “We’re really dependent on the public doing some whistleblowing. It’s about customers calling it out.
This isn’t a problem you can police your way out of. It’s not like the will isn’t there to eradicate criminality, but it’s very hard to detect.”
Actually, it really isn’t difficult. A few CCTV cameras (even £25 trail cameras) would soon establish customer footfall and types of visitors. And what about HMRC? Can’t they investigate the discrepancy between overheads, customers and income? Also what about the local council? Who has okayed the use of these shops as accommodation? Presumably they haven’t and if not they should be closed down.
Yes, a joined up investigation will cost money but the cost to the taxpayer of not doing anything is huge. It is estimated £150 Billion of dirty money is laundered in the UK, costing the tax payer £40 billion! Not only that, but these gangs are actively engaged in people smuggling thousands of illegal immigrant into the UK that costs us more money in accommodation, benefits, education, translation and medical bills etc.
Richard Tice as spoken out on this asking, “Seen the rise in the number of Barber shops everywhere? Many of them are fronts for money laundering. Only Reform UK will investigate this racket, and close them down.”
We can help Richard Tice and hit back against people smuggling and crime by being vigilant. We need a Citizen’s Watch type organisation that can monitor what’s going on in our city and town centres. Perhaps we could compile data and feed it through to the authorities or our elected representatives/ Something we could organise in Reform for each branch to get involved with?
