Online shopping has not killed off the high street, yet

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, not at the beginning of the year when the wise and good were confidently predicting that Brexit-bound Britain would turn out to have the worst economy in the developed world in 2023. The UK economy would be contracting, they said, while almost everyone else’s expanded.

Now, as Germany descended officially into recession this week, more evidence emerges that Britain, so far, has avoided the same fate. The Office for National Statistics’ retail figures for April show that sales volumes were up 0.5 per cent on the month. This needs to be read in conjunction with March’s figures, which were revised downwards to a fall of 1.2 per cent (the first estimate put it at a fall of 0.9 per cent). But if you smooth out the volatile monthly figures, sales were still up 0.8