Pressures on High Street retailers have once again brought the subject of business rates back up to the top of the agenda. Hard pressed shopkeepers, who do so much to attract customers who drive our local economy, angrily point to online traders who don’t pay so much in business rates and who avoid the cost of maintain expensive physical shop fronts. They make the reasonable point that being undercut by the internet is unfair and call for a levelling up, perhaps by imposing a