Personal Blogs

This week my local council announced its plans for the demolition of it old offices close to the centre of town. Although the building is only 50 years old it fails to meet contemporary building standards in almost every respect and would cost millions to bring up to code whilst the office based workforce dwindles.

The plans are nothing too egregious, you know the sort of thing, new homes and public gardens that will inevitably look better in designer's CAD software than in real life when the local spice addicts have had a chance to populate them. 

(Incidentally, why can't designers ever give these sort of images a realistic aesthetic of empty White Lightning cans strewn under benches, surly teenagers wearing dubiously sourced hoodies and bedraggled Amazon bought England flags looking mournful as the cable ties that hold them in place slip slowly down the lampposts?)

Obviously, when the plans were posted by the council to local 'Spotted' Facebook groups, with the added caveat that those staffing the authority's comms team are real people too and abuse will be deleted, the comments were to be as expected.

"What a waste of money!", "I suppose the houses will be for boat people!", "Why can't we have a Primark instead?"

It's that last comment that on these sort of posts is the most common. There will always be a sizeable minority lamenting the loss of the high street, and that the council should bring in a number of well known brands: sometimes Next, sometimes Marks and Spencer,  but always Primark.

And, of course, it's that last comment that always fails to show any meaningful comprehension of the retail environment that we live in today.

I wrote a few days ago about the challenges our charity retail sector is facing as overheads increase and donations are hit dramatically by platforms such as Vinted.

Today, is another story of woe on the high street, and whilst not one that will materially affect my own little former mining town it does speak to the wider problems retail faces. 

The Times reports that this week Selfridges published accounts for 2024 showing a pre-tax loss of £15.9 million pounds adding that although footfall is up by more than 1 million people throughout the year the company was in deficit. Any retail business can have a bad year and with an historic legacy Selfridges will have the status to withstand the economic headwinds better than most. Only this isn't 'a bad year', last year the business posted losses of £42 million and overall the company hasn't made a profit since 2019.

There are real fears that Selfridges will close, and it is certainly true that department stores are struggling, anyone remember Debenhams?

But arguably Selfridges is different. It's high end, a destination, it's special. What next? Harrods? Quite possibly.

Part of the problem is that retail has been beset by a cocktail of existential challenges with the internet being the most prominent and Selfridges have commented that the issue doing them the most damage is the government's policy of getting rid of tax free shopping for overseas visitors. No longer can wealthy international tourists come to Britain and buy their LV and Prada cheaply (and add to the economy through hotel and hospitality use whilst doing so), so they are taking their exorbitant shopping trips elsewhere.

One of the most serious criticisms of this government is that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. Wealth is portable and whilst the government's calls for fairness may be laudable we are witnessing in real time an exodus of the super wealthy from Britain, an education system driving international students away, and now, a retail environment that deters people that would have previously added to the exchequer whilst taking nothing out. Britain's soft power is being damaged daily.

But I digress, back to retail and those social media comments in my little, run-down town.

The world is a highly complex place and there will always be people that cry that it's not like it used to be and ask why can't we go back?

But we can only live in the world that we have chosen. A world with internet shopping, a world with massive public services and high welfare standards, a world where international competitors have outstripped us in educational attainment and innovation.

We can't have Primark in our little town, and potentially may soon not have Selfridges in our cities, because that world doesn't exist anymore.

The real challenge we face is that the constituency calling for a return to a past that no longer exists will fall for snake-oil salesman that promise they can deliver it. They won't, and the deterioration will only gather pace.

Unless we speak truth to the ignorant now the prospects for our high streets, and our country, can only ever worsen.

Ask the man on the Clapham omnibus what he thinks about politicians and more often than not his answer will at some point include a variation of 'they are all liars'

YouGov data from 2024, an election year, showed that of all professions only those who run pressure groups were more distrusted than Members of Parliament (although the response is a little different members of the public are asked about their own MP). In that survey just 18% of respondents had some degree of trust in MPs, only 1% of respondents would qualify that as 'a great deal of trust'.

Compare that to 66% overall trust in academics, 73% teachers, 82% scientists and 83% family doctors and you can see the perilous state that democracy is in.

So, when Labour were elected to power last year a narrative of untrustworthiness was never likely to be far away. It wasn't helped when some dancing on the head of pin allowed the party to qualify the increase to employer's contributions for National Insurance as not being 'a tax on working people'.

It didn't help with hastily announced changes to winter fuel allowance and personal independence payment policy, and their botched u-turns. It didn't even help as Government brought forward its timetable for adding VAT onto independent school fees with the one it had arguably implied that it would introduce prior to the election.

One significant contributing factor to the Government's unprecedentedly poor favourability ratings could be argued to be its lack of trustworthiness.

It is therefore potentially fatal that despite regular questioning at party conference this week that Labour appear to be equivocating on their most prominent pre-election pledge not to introduce new taxes on 'working people'. Prior to the election they qualified those taxes as income tax, national insurance and VAT.

When asked on the radio this morning whether she stands by her statement last year not to come back for more borrowing or more tax rises Pippa Crerar, Political Editor at The Guardian, posts Chancellor Rachel Reeves as responding "I think everyone can see the world has changed in the last year and we are not immune to that."

Elsewhere on yesterday's morning media round the Prime Minister was challenged several times on the VAT aspect of his pre-election pledge only to equivocate.

The Chancellor is right, the world has changed in the past year, but the party's promises at that time didn't make that caveat, they were clear.

Any change now only contributes to the impression of dishonesty. They knew things had the potential to change, but they still made they promise.

It is, perhaps, the hoariest of all political cliches but President George H W Bush felt the distaste on the American people after going back on his 1988 promise "Read my lips, no new taxes", albeit other factors had a material effect on the result of the subsequent 1992 election too.

But that example should highlight the impact that misleading the public can have on the future of a politician.

Labour should be very, very careful indeed about u-turning on their most prominent pre-election pledge. At a time when they are languishing in the polls they may find they have not hit rock bottom yet.

Today saw the final round of voting amongst MPs in the Conservative leadership election, and in something of a shock result yesterday's first placed leader, James Cleverly, slipped into third place and was eliminated from the contest.

The final results were:

- Kemi Badenoch - 42 votes

- James Cleverly 37 votes

- Robert Jenrick - 41 votes

There's already rumours that a vote lending operation from Cleverly to Jenrick went wrong, but we will never know if that is true or not.

But what we do know without doubt is that Badenoch and Jenrick in getting 42 and 41 votes respectively only managed to secure around one third each of the votes of Conservative MPs. That is a similar amount to the proportion earned by Liz Truss in 2022.

And whilst it is significantly more than the 16% of available votes secured by Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election of 2015 (albeit under a very different process) it does point towards troubled waters ahead for whoever wins the Conservative contest.

For the leadership of any party (or any organisation for that matter) it is vitally important that the boss has the support of the majority of people who work closest with them.

In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn didn't have the support of his fellow Labour MPs, in 2022 Liz Truss fell short of majority support of her colleagues by some way. 

Whatever happens now to Kemi Badenoch or Rob Jenrick they will be starting their stint of leadership knowing that two thirds of their closest colleagues didn't support them, and in the very near future they are likely to be more than happy to let journalists know that was the case.

Inevitably there are choppy waters ahead in the Conservative Party leadership - probably long before the next General Election.