NOISE ABATEMENT busybodies wish to un-invent the mobile phone, Ken Livingstone and his pals at Transport Chaos for London wish to un-invent the car, the NHS Trust at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford wishes to un-invent a heart operation that came to the rescue of Tony Blair. (At least they do for the likes of you.) And now an all-party group of MPs will attempt the greatest feat of anti-creativity ever attempted. They will un-invent supermarkets.

Having spent the past three decades doing everything in their power to construct a monster that feeds on livelihoods and whose only purpose is mammon and monopoly, our brave MPs will now come to the aid of small businesses, so that we can all happily regress to the days when Britain was served by Ronnie Barker types in brown overalls, and genial overgrown delivery boys rode bikes along cobbled streets, just like Open All Hours.

Unfortunately, the members of the All-Party Group on Small Shops are not the solution. They are the problem. They seek to redress an imbalance that many of their number will have helped to create on the way up the ladder. Big government is not to blame for the death of the high street. Small government killed the high street. Small government with its anti-social parking restrictions giving the supermarket the only safe berth in town. Small government with its rate holidays for the mighty. Small government with its exorbitant rents for the little guy. Small government with its petty bureaucracy, greed and short-sightedness. And scratch a big politician and, most often, a smaller one pops out. Those now wringing hands over the decline of the family business are the same types that helped to put a Tesco on every street corner.

In each part of the country, chain grocery stores have flourished over 30 years. Local councils are the real culprits here. Many offered financial incentives to supermarkets while squeezing pipsqueaks until the pips squeaked; others introduced transport initiatives that made the pop to the shops almost impossible. Yet the all party group spent hours interviewing representatives of the Office of Fair Trading, when really they should have turned the spotlight on themselves. For who comprises the all-party group? Former local councillors. The sort of men and women that were left in charge of the premises throughout the time it was swamped by the ever-expanding aisles of the superstores.

Chairman of this all-party group is Jim Dowd, Labour MP for Lewisham West, and a local councillor in the area from 1974 to 1994, serving as Mayor of Lewisham in 1992. He is ably assisted by vice-chairman Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for Ribble Valley, and between 1985 and 1991 a member of West Glamorgan County Council. The all-party group secretary is Bob Russell, Liberal Democrat member for Colchester, and a member of Colchester Borough Council from 1971 to 2002, leading it between 1987 and 1991, before which he served a year as Mayor. So that works out as three senior members of a parliamentary committee amassing 57 years in local government during the time in which high streets lost all character and individuality. While there is no suggestion of personal culpability on the part of Dowd, Russell or Evans, the conclusion that small businesses are screwed and nasty old supermarkets are to blame might be better balanced by asking whether Tesco could have swept all before it had the playing field stayed level.

What the 20-strong all-party group fails to address (and former council men from all areas are littered throughout its ranks) is the role that was played, and continues to be played, in the march of the supermarkets by thousands of councillors every year.

My high street is dying. It is being strangled, not by the large Tesco at one end (which has been there for years), but by the decision of Epping Forest council to implement an aggressive, privately run, parking scheme that preys on the local community as it pops to and from the shops. A retailer calls these visitors his “passing trade” and, without them, small business is doomed.

Slowly, since the parking mafia invaded, our high street has been sinking, as family concerns that have stood for a century and independent tradesmen that helped to give the town its personality have been forced away. The only safe place to park now is, of course, Tesco — where parking time is limited to stop it being used as a base to explore — but there is no evidence that Tesco manipulated that fortuitous situation. The buck stops with the council who, through thoughtless greed, degraded their community.

Governments get us into the big bad stuff, such as wars, but to unstitch the fabric of society delicately, it takes a little mind concerned only with piddling revenue streams; men who talk community service while in reality seeking only to advance their importance within party politics. The nameless councillor who today authorises a rates holiday for the ring road superstore will tomorrow be the MP behind a mealy-mouthed report into the reasons behind the death of 6,000 smaller economic outlets annually. As if the actions are unrelated.

When Sainsbury opened a huge aircraft hangar of a place near Beckton, East London, free buses were laid on to ferry customers to the site and local councillors from the London Borough of Newham stood in street markets handing out leaflets to advertise the fact. Now, as just about every London market is breathing its last, the same councils hold meetings in which men who (to borrow the language of another age) couldn’t sell pound notes for nineteen shillings scratch their heads and wonder what can be done to maintain the capital’s market tradition.

The good news is that soon it will not be their problem. Having left the locality boarded up and bankrupt, the movers and shakers of local government can turn to the next page of the CV, Westminster and the all-party group. Nice work if you can get it.

And while the masters of un-invention call the shots, getting it will never be too hard.