Here’s another one of those terribly silly ideas that people keep having. People aren’t using the High Street as much as they used to. Therefore everyone must be taxed more in order to subsidise that High Street that no fewer people want to use :
The Labour Party is considering a new secret tax on the high street to try to boost ailing town centres across the UK if it wins next year’s General Election.An advisory group created by Labour to consider the future of the high street has recommended that it looks at introducing a new levy on residents to fund a major expansion of Business Improvement Districts, which manage local areas.In its report, which has been seen by The Telegraph, the High Street Advisory Group recommends “diversifying the application of BIDs, including the ability to assess property owners and residents” and says that “new tools will need to be explored which diversify income streams”.
Sigh.
OK, so hands up everyone, why are people using the High Street less?
Yes, correct, because some 11 to 12% of retail sales now take place on the internet. We thus require some 11 to 12% less retail space on a High Street. Or, if you wish to be picky, we require 11 to 12% fewer High Streets. So the idea of taxing the people who don’t want to use High Streets as much as they used to in order to preserve those High Streets they no longer want to use is, well, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Akin to taxing Ford and GM to keep buggy whip makers in business.
But sadly it’s not just ridiculous. For what do we also have a shortage of? Yes, you’re right again, batting 1.0 so far. We have a shortage of housing in the centre of towns, where people like to live (OK, some people like to live, but enough people do that the point still stands). And what else have we got? That 11 to 12% of former retail space that has gone bust and is standing empty. Walls, roof, utility connections: bish bosh with a bit of plasterboard and some Dulux and we can convert one to the other. You know, this structural change stuff, where we move an extant asset from a lower valued use to a higher and thereby make the nation and society richer as a result?
And what is the response to this? Quite seriously there are people campaigning to deny change of planning use from retail (most especially the pubs that no one is allowed to smoke in any more, and are thus going bust) to homes and houses. That’s not ridiculous that’s just crazed lunacy.
Sigh.
Tempus mutandis and the extant infrastructure of the nation occasionally needs to be repurposed. The idea that we should tax everyone to set it in aspic is so, so, well, it could really only have come from politicians, couldn’t it?
One Response to “Why does everyone want to subsidise the stuff that no one wants any more?”
- Well . . . yes, such ideas can only come from politicians, and London-based and London-dominated politicians, at that, despite their obligatory Friday afternoon surgeries in their constituencies. Until and unless we have Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, Welsh, Scottish — and yes, London — Parliaments (together with a ruthless, proportionate dispersal of the London-based civil service), then silly ideas will continue to emanate from London in an attempt to turn the clock back to times when all the regions outside London did not need subsidies in order to maintain the appearance of a British culture withal.The reason for the Act of Union of 1707, and the subsequent decline of a vibrant and educationally superior Scotland, as well as our present economic impasse generally is that ambitious politicians and talented people migrate to where the money is. Ever since the 17th century, by virtue of London’s dominance in international trade and finance, that’s where the money has been. Even in the 19th century, when Manchester or Birmingham threated to de-throne London as the most prosperous (and most cultured) city, London’s banks — the Bank of England most of all — managed to remain top dog by means of starving those cities of needed investments — which previously had been available — in favour of (apparently) easier profits abroad. Thus Germany and America took over our role as the major manufacturing country of the world.Or perhaps talented Londoners (and, until, the last few decades, the civil service was very talented indeed) were prescient enough to realise that our industrial economy was going to give way anyway to a highly educated professional services economy, and that talented people from all round the country were going to be even more likely to migrate to London for jobs, commercial opportunities, meeting other exciting talented people and so on.So there we are. London can do nothing for the rest of the country except to come up with political wheezes every now and again, and dish out welfare for as long as it cares to. Unless London has a fit of madness, it will get on with its sensible strategy according to David Ricardo.
