A shop's Christmas window display takes aim at the Tories

Support us and become ad-free

A West Sussex shop has used its Christmas window display to target the Tory government over the ongoing cost of living crisis.

Eco2Home: the circular economy

Lee Barnett owns Eco2Home, a shop in Burgess Hill, West Sussex. The outlet bills itself as a “circular economy” store. That means it sells items that would normally go to landfill. As the website Circular wrote:

The circular economy is based on a fundamentally different concept than the linear model of business that we are all familiar with.
The circular economy is essentially a production and consumption system based on recycling, reuse, repair, remanufacturing and sharing of products – and therefore by definition requires a change in consumption patterns, new business models and circular production resource allocation.
As a result, our usual methods of assessing national economic performance in a linear system – using indicators such as gross domestic product, productivity and inflation rates – are not sufficient or adequate to measure the circular economy.
Currently, estimates suggest that only 8.6 percent of the global economy is circular.

The store is open two days a week, has multiple values and states that it:

Plant 45 trees for every ton of waste we can’t recycle or reuse.

Eco2Home won Burgess Hill’s 2020 Best Christmas Window Competition for a truly festive display. This year, however, Barnett has decided to make a political mark – and it’s a massive departure from what Eco2Home normally does.

Aiming at the Tories

Barnett used his storefront to stage “The reality of Christmas in 2022.” A window shows Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Mims Davies (MP for Mid Sussex) in a decadent living room setting:

A second window shows a child wrapped in blankets sitting at a table with a pot noodle and a letter to Santa Clause describing the grim reality of the cost of living crisis. An electrical fire has a “Do not turn on” notice on it:

There is a note from a child asking Santa Claus:

If my mother could be home for Christmas, she always has to work.

Eco2Home made relevant points on the current cost of living crisis: how the Tories sit nicely while the rest of us suffer to varying degrees. Barnett should be applauded for that and would win Best Window Display again in a fair world – albeit perhaps for different reasons this year.

Featured image and additional images via Eco2Home