THE FIRST THING to say is that Stephen Pollard (Thunderer, yesterday) is right. The EU Trade Commission is being hypocritical and stupid over Chinese clothing imports, slapping on violently protectionist quotas and impounding millions of innocent trousers. His indignation was expressed largely on behalf of the developing world, a concern which I endorse; mine is also for retailers across Europe — some small and vulnerable — who placed their orders legally and paid for them in good faith, only to find they may have nothing to put on the shelves because Mr Mandelson’s boys have impounded the order at the port. Alisdair Gray, of the British Retail Consortium, spelt it out: using this sudden quota, the EU has grabbed or severely delayed goods that were ordered at a time when there was no restriction. The rag trade needs long lead times: the Commission, said Mr Grey sadly, has not much idea how modern retailing works.

Four trade ministers from Scandinavia and the Netherlands agree, saying Brussels acted “without proper regard for the realities of modern commerce”. That rings true enough, and should make British heads droop a little in shame: realistically, it was only a matter of time before Commissioner Peter Mandelson fouled up in some arrogant and ignorant way. There goes another legacy of our habit of giving big jobs in Europe to failed politicians who never ran a whelk stall. I hope very much that companies torpedoed by this nonsense will sue. The German fashion house Gelco has already filed a complaint for breach of its constitutional rights, and good luck to it.

Yet when I read doomsday predictions of consumers suffering a massively reduced choice of blouses, knickers, trousers and sweaters this autumn, there are flickerings of a quite different feeling: relief, tinged with excitement. As silver linings go this may be a good one. For in clothing as in food, the benefits of choice have gone farther than is healthy. The West is becoming a nursery of spoilt shopaholics, prodigal wasters, landfill-junkies. Food and clothes, once sober essentials, have slid downward as a proportion of family spending — cars and other transport come top, then recreation (especially electronics). Food comes third; and clothing and footwear fourth, down in the past 20 years from 8 to 5 per cent. Yet though we spend proportionally less on these things, we throw far more of them away. We have an obsession with newness and change unprecedented in human history.

Just as we discard food (a survey this year said we throw away 30 per cent of all we buy), so also we chuck out clothes for being a tiny bit dated, minimally damaged or just a wrong choice. We do it because they are cheap. You can buy a good cotton shirt in a supermarket for £3, less than a latte and a muffin; you may even get a second one free. You can kit out a primary-school child for a tenner.

We are spoilt on price and also on choice. Why must there always be 128 kinds of biscuit? Who needs strawberries in winter? How terrible would it be if every colour and size of knicker did not come in an alternative of tanga, bikini, hi-cut, medium leg and matronly? How many pairs of weekend trousers can a man need? Why is it not considered disgraceful to throw away a T-shirt instead of washing it?

The answer, of course, is price. From wartime austerity and traditional carefulness we have come to an age of insolent plenty. The stuff may not all be quality, but by God it’s cheap. And since we measure most things by financial worth, we are happy to discard. Cheese gone green? Your granny would have cut off the sides, but there’s plenty of cheap cheese so we bin it. Salad got a limp leaf or two? Out! Sweater got a snag, jacket hoody caught on barbed wire? Nobody darns or patches now — into the binbag! Skirt is last year’s? Throw it to the charity shop (or, if it needs cleaning and you can’t be bothered, straight into the skip). Can’t find a clean navy T-shirt in the chaos of your wardrobe? Buy one on the way to the station. A few fastidious people still dress the old-fashioned way, buying beautifully made staples and caring for them over decades, but they are rare, alien to mainstream culture.

The cheerful thing about all this prodigal plenty is that nobody need go around in rags or stand in dreary Soviet-style queues for every pair of ill-fitting knickers. As for food, apart from the very poor (who still exist, largely ignored and excluded) nobody has an excuse for being malnourished. The less cheerful result is that we waste so much, and demand such cheapness, that we exploit the developing world.

More subtly, having a plethora of goods on sale but ever fewer safe public spaces without shops, it means that we use shopping — especially clothes shopping — as a recreation. It becomes a substitute for play, and exploration, and talk, and just sauntering sociably around and appreciating cities for their own sake. The mall replaces the park and the playing field. Magazines that once taught women how to mend and create things now giggle about “retail therapy”. Apparently sane females admit in weekend papers to perversions such as “de-shopping”, in which, just for a buzz, you buy things that you can’t afford and take them back next week for a refund; thus blatantly cheating the retailer out of packaging and accounting costs. Children get into the habit of thinking a journey into town is wasted if you just see a museum and have a meal, returning without carrier bags. Entrepreneurs prefer retailing and marketing to anything that involves the risky business of actually producing anything.

We apply balm to life’s small frustrations by buying ourselves little daily presents: prosperity tips into decadence. Perhaps a brief pause in the frenzy would do us good. Oh, and if anybody does run out of navy T-shirts this autumn, you’re welcome to thirty or forty of mine.

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