The downward spiral of UK high streets highlights the failure of Tory economic policy
Pretty soon, high street shopfronts will be no use as anything other than sheltering spots for homeless people.
See those empty shops on your local high street? They are a sign of Tory economic failure – and they’re not going to magically fill up by themselves to fulfil neoliberal dreams.
They need investment – which isn’t going to happen under a Conservative government because the Tories have managed to increase the national debt from around £800 billion to £2.2 trillion in the nine years they’ve had control of UK economic policy.
Put simply – and I’ve stated this many times before – Tories simply don’t understand how to run an economy.
One in 10 shops in UK town centres are lying empty, according to figures that underline the scale of the high street crisis.
The national town centre vacancy rate climbed to a four-year high of 10.2% last month, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) vacancies monitor. The vacancy rate has risen in each of the last four quarters to give the highest reading since April 2015, up from 9.9% three months ago.
The BRC’s chief executive, Helen Dickinson, said some struggling high streets were trapped in a downward spiral: “Empty shopfronts, particularly for larger stores, can deter shoppers from an area. This effect can be cyclical, with the long-term decline in footfall pushing up vacancy rates, particularly in poorer areas.”
Source: UK high streets ‘in downward spiral’ with one in 10 shops empty | Business | The Guardian
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Not just Tory policy, but 40 years of neo-liberalism and a nation past the point of cheap energy:
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A BBC news article yesterday shows that despite the Government’s best efforts to run down the NHS and kill the disabled, people are still not dying quick enough.
This Tory – style promotion of profits being more important than people really left me with a chill.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48252127
I have long said that councils need to ensure that shop rents are reasonable allowing smaller businesses to survive , and car parking in town centres needs to be cheaper or free (or decent park and ride schemes) to encourage shoppers. Otherwise it’s expensive to get there to just visit big chains and buy stuff you can get on the internet.
Tories are nasty, vindictive, incompetent and only interested in enriching themselves – preferably at the expense of society as a whole. They must be held to account.
It’s ironic how the shops which generate today’s economy sell gear which in a collapse might not be much use. A designer suit is nice but it won’t keep out the weather like a parka from Oxfam; electrical gear has limited use in a grid-down; and there’s probably more practical stuff in one army surplus store than in many well-stocked showrooms.
In the coming collapse the smart looters will target army surplus, pawnbrokers, charity shops etc for useful gear we can all use, and leave the designer stuff for the mobs.