It’s just been announced that parliament are to hold an inquiry into the state of retail in the UK. Be still my beating heart, another inquiry, we’re all SAVED!
This on the same day that Vince – have you seen my glasses? – Cable put on his comfortable shoes and wandered on to the stage at Retail Week Live to tell us he’s looking into it all for us and will be “having a word” with the chancellor about business rates. Meanwhile explaining that the best place for UK retail is apparently outside the UK. Irony is obviously not a concept that Mr Cable is particularly familiar with.
Excuse me if I don’t wet myself with anticipation Uncle Vince, but didn’t you say that about the banks a couple of weeks ago when it was revealed that, rather than lending out cash to entrepreneurs under the new government scheme designed to encourage banks to do just that, you let at least one of them trouser another large wad of public cash and lend out even less?! This after a threatening them all with regulation if they didn’t play nice a couple of years back.
After taking a stand on this issue that was about as aggressive as a 5 year old with a spud gun, he announced that he’d be “having conversations” with them too. I’m sure they’re all cowering in their luxury riverside penthouses and waiting with mounting terror waiting for the gold plated phone to ring.
And now we have another inquiry.
But hang on, didn’t we have one of those carried out only a year or so ago, by someone famous? Yes, that lady off the telly, the one with the pointy finger and the knickers. Now what was her name?
What exactly they expect to find from another inquiry is anyone’s guess. The problems have already been laid in front of them and the best they could come up with was a talent show and a TV programme.
These problems haven’t gone away just because they’ve ignored them. They certainly haven’t been made all better by dint of them handing out some cash to a few selected towns, even if any of them had actually got around to spending it. In fact they’ve got worse. Perhaps those extra holes in the high street and the additional number retail employees on the dole might have been a tiny clue.
After a raft of major high street collapses over the past few months one would expect them to take the information that they already have and run with it. Come up with some radical solutions. Show some leadership. Or at the very least perhaps not make the situation worse by whacking an extra £170M on to the retail business rates bill in a little under 3 weeks.
This really does beggar belief. It’s ‘Yes Minister’ politics made flesh. Just keep inquiring but never actually DO anything. Meanwhile throw billions at the banks and penny pinch on an industry that contributes around 11% to GDP when we ask if we could perhaps forgo a paltry amount in taxation, just this once.
Why don’t they just show us some respect and be honest? Admit that they don’t give a toss as long as the tax money keeps rolling in and the retail cash cow keeps mooing. I know it’s not politically expedient to say that, but at least we’d all know where we stand.
Right now that seems to be far too close to Vince Cable in the gents toilets of the last chance saloon, while he pisses on our shoes and tells us it’s raining.
Fifty Shades Of Retail 