IT WAS, BY ANYONE’S reckoning, a bargain. A four-man tent, with individual foam mattresses and cotton-lined sleeping bags — ten kilos of camping kit! — for £24.99. Why would you not buy it? Put it up in the garden, let the kids camp out (until they crash indoors at 3am freaked out by foxes). Then, come September, if it’s mouldy or half the pegs are missing, sling it to the back of the shed with last summer’s punctured paddling pool and all the other manufactured mayflies.

“There’s something wrong somewhere,” my sister-in-law mused, as we heaved the box into the car. The miraculous cheapness of what would have, until a decade ago, been a medium-sized household purchase, provoked unease rather than glee. Who along the commercial chain had been shafted to make that rock-bottom retail price?

I interviewed the poet Simon Armitage last week in his garden strewn with his daughter’s plastic paraphenalia: “It looks like effing Alton Towers, doesn’t it?” he groaned. He’d just been writing about his parents’ house, a place of finite objects — the record player, the wedding-present clock, the fruit bowl — unchanging icons of his childhood, pillars of domestic stability. Whereas, through Armitage’s house, like my own, there flows an eternal river of stuff.

A month ago I dropped my mobile down the loo. There followed the longest two hours of my life in the over-heated offices of Phones4U. For free market principles that Adam Smith himself would struggle to comprehend, related to call tariffs and rival line-rental firms, I left with two new phones. Both were absolutely free. The first mobile was to tide me over for just a week until the second, my proper phone, began its life. Then what should I do with the first? “Well, just chuck it,” came the bemused reply.

There comes a point, when you have to address the consequences of a world where one half toils to create elaborate objects that the rest of us buy, grow bored by and bin.

The £4 Tesco jeans, the £8 sequinned sandals, a whole bundle of this season’s tops snaffled up for £20 at Primark, an entire school uniform for the price of a pizza. Fashion has been democratised: who could begrudge the less well-off equal rights to a pretty wardrobe? But before I buy my sons a pair of £3 supermarket shorts, I would like to know exactly why they are so cheap. Doesn’t human decency require we ask?

Were they sewn by Bangladeshi garment workers — half the price of Chinese labourers — whose minimum wage has actually fallen in real terms over the past decade? Supermarkets pit Third World factories against each other, threaten to take their massive orders elsewhere, demand a price nip and tuck. So the factories comply and the savings on your budget label shirt comes from the pockets of the poorest.

The only political power we have left is in our purses. And just as I don’t want apples covered in chemicals, I won’t buy shorts stained with sweat-shop despair. Isn’t it time to demand the fast-fashion giants Matalan, Primark, Asda and Tesco — which now account for 40 per cent of the garments we own, yet only 17 per cent of our clothing spend — are more transparent, let us into the shady secrets of their supply chain?

And while the developing world loses out materially, we suffer in spiritual terms. A publishing friend told me about research she’d witnessed on readers of women’s magazines. “They all said their main hobby was shopping,” she sighed. And these weren’t young handbag-crazed popsies either, but ladies of middle years, who might once have found great satisfaction in making things. But why bother to knit a jumper when a Tesco fleece costs a fiver, why sew your daughter a summer dress when you can buy two for the cost of the material?

Maybe women are happier liberated from such drudgery. But what do we do with that labour-saved time? Write novels? Play with our children? No, we trudge the shopping malls, or surf for bargains online, work longer hours to buy more stuff. Or, despite this unchallenged myth that our lives are busier than any previous generation’s, we spend ever more time slumped before the TV.

If the objects in our lives have no worth or meaning or longevity, if they are perpetually replaced by shiny new ones, what effect does this have our sense of self? Already I find it impossible to get my sons to look after their possessions, to put games back in boxes, to run down the garden in search of lost scissors. They have too many things to care enough about any single one. Something breaks and the words they dare not utter because I’d fly into a rage, hang in the air: never mind, we can always buy another . . .

The weight of the new über-consumerism bears down hardest upon the young. They are most prey to the messages that they are uncool, sexually repulsive, worthless without that almost instantly obsolete fashionable “must have”. To participate fully in society now means to consume. But if everything is so cheap, just bung it on the plastic and hoover it up. From desire to fulfillment without the interim wistful thrill of anticipation.

And so this week the Financial Services Authority revealed that 18 to 29-year-olds account for one fifth of bankruptcies in England and Wales. These kids have maxed out, gone bust, killed their credit ratings, screwed chances of ever owning a home, even before their lives have truly begun. Student loans obliterated for ever the notion that young people should exist remotely within their means. If you leave university with an average of £13,000 hanging round your neck, what’s another easyJet flight or the latest celebrity-endorsed bag?

For all his avowed prudence Gordon Brown has never spoken a word of caution against youth debt — even though its consequences will dog our century, producing a housing crisis and a generation without savings or pensions. Moreover, the FSA says, a sudden, cold blast of unemployment could fell the under-40s who have spent their whole lives in the red and have no property to cushion their risk. But then what Chancellor would ever say stop this shopping madness? The success of the British economy is predicated upon splurge and sod the future, upon that weekly Primark sparkly top, the annual 20-quid tent.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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