Two news stories have caught my eye recently: the proposed changes to planning laws to allow more houses to be built on green belt land and the death of the high street. This got me thinking.
Most of us have a nostalgic view of the good old British high street. One which is full of independent shops, with a friendly greengrocer and a butcher called George, who knows everyone's name. A high street with a couple of pubs full of old characters with a tale or two to tell, a bright lively place full of community spirit. We have this view because whenever the six o'clock news do a story on the demise of the high street and show all the empty shops and boarded up pubs, they play a news reel from the 1950s when the high street was thriving. But life's just not like that now.
The reason people used to shop on the local high street is because they didn't have supermarkets, shopping malls and retail parks. People in the old days were also willing to use an outdated method of transport called walking. We need to move on accept that the old high street has gone forever. Just like coal mining and ship building. People need to move on from this romantic view we have that Britain can return to what it once was.
I also don't have much time for the theory that the high street is dying because of recession or the threat of a double dip. Most shopping malls are packed to the rafters with people spending money all year round. Some shops simply close because of basic economic factors like supply and demand. Why would I go to a shop on the high street, spend 20 minutes trying to park, which also costs money, to buy a CD or a book when I can do it with the click of a button on my iPhone or kindle?
There is also the factor of what's on offer of at the local high street compared to a supermarket or shopping mall. There's a high street near to where I live that has about thirty shops and four pubs, two of which are boarded up. Of the thirty shops there are four banks, five hairdressers, seven charity shops and about twelve restaurants and takeaways. Even looters during the recent London riots passed through without finding anything worth stealing, let alone buying.
Then we come to the governments idea of making more land available to build on by relaxing planning laws to build more houses in the English countryside. Which seems to be about as popular as a pork store in a Mosque.
So what's the answer to the housing crisis? High rise tower blocks are unpopular, so up is not the answer. Building half a dozen houses in your back garden is a sure way to upset the neighbours. And poping down the local for a quick pint only find it's been converted into luxury modern apartments puts a real dampener on the evening.
So put the two problems of a dying high street and a lack of available space to build new homes together and I believe you come up with the answer: reduce the size of the high street and replace the empty shops and boarded up pubs with homes.
By reducing the number of shops this will increase trade and turnover for those left. Having empty shops has been proven to have a negative affect on trade. So buy condensing the high street into a smaller local shopping area and building homes on the land close buy, local people will start shopping locally again.
Napoleon once described Britain as being a "nation of shop keepers" and now change in the way we live and shop is needed to make sure the British high street is not lost forever.
Friday, 9 September 2011
Sunday, 24 July 2011
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Why Phone Hacking Could Save Britain From Going Bust
Back in 2007 all was good in the world, or so we thought. But from what I can understand: some American banks had been lending money to some Mexicans to buy houses, and the sub-prime mortgage market was born. Keen not to miss out on this stupidity, British banks then bought those bad debts from the Americans and sold them to each other. Then when the Mexican who was earning about $5 an hour couldn't pay his $500,000 mortgage, the worlds banking system collapsed. Then the prime minister of Britain at the time, Gordon Brown, decided he would make sure all his friends in the City would still get their pensions, and borrowed about £800 million from the Chinese and bailed the banks out. The result was a big fat recession.
Or was it? If you read the papers in 2008 around the time of the Lehman's collapse, they'd have you believing things were going to be about thirty times worse than the great depression of the thirties. Every so called expert in the financial world of London was predicting Armageddon. But it just didn't arrive. Certainly not to anywhere near the extent of what the papers were saying it would.
Before the financial downturn many people in the UK were paying mortgages of between 6-8% on massively overpriced properties. I myself couldn't afford to move to a bigger house. But then the crash that was supposed to end the world came, and the Bank of England slashed it's interest rates. Suddenly homeowners were paying almost half the amount for their mortgage. House prices dropped, which allowed thousands to move home. People were working less hours so they had more time to spend with their families and enjoy some leisure time with the extra money they had in their pockets. Many of the people made redundant that were unhappy in their jobs for years, started their own business. But did the papers report it like this? Of course not. They wrote headlines about national debt and how our grandchildren's grandchildren would still be paying it off.
The media use headlines to scare people all the time. When bird flu was being spread the media reported it in such an extreme way the financial institutes of London had emergency headquarters arranged in the English countyside. Swine flu was the same. That was a classic. Blanket coverage on every 24 hour news channel had the N.H.S set up a help line that people phoned and said they had a headache and felt a bit hot, and the call centre worker on the other end of the phone gave them a week off work! It was amazing how many people got swine flu on a monday morning.
My point is, newspapers and the media in general only get excited over bad news. If B.M.W creates a thousand jobs it'll receive about four lines on page 17 of a paper and be announced just before the weather on the six o'clock news. If Jaguar layoff 200 workers it's front page material and the leading story at 6pm. Which is why the phone hacking story is a god send that may save us from a recession.
Phone hacking, for me, is just not important enough to dominate the news channels for three weeks. It obviously has it's sad and dark elements. Listening to a missing girls voicemails and giving her family false hope that she's alive is beyond contempt. But other than that, I don't care whether Hugh Grant or Gordon Brown had their phones hacked. But because these so called celebrities and politicians are so obsessed with themselves, that's all we've read and heard about. The left wing Labour party have become fixated on destroying Rupert Murdoch, a man who employs over 50,000 people worldwide. Ed Milliband, the leader of the opposition, is determined to make the Prime Minister apologise for remaining loyal to his friend, Andy Coulson, a man who hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, let alone found guilty. And while they concentrate on these important issues, the small matter of Europe ceasing to trade is passing them by.
The Euro as a currency could cease to exist within days. America could miss a debt payment for the first time and go into meltdown. Millions of people in Africa could die of starvation. But what do a 127 MPs want to ask the prime minister about in an emergency session of the House of Commons? Phone hacking of course. That's right. Never in the long history of parliament have so many MP's had a chance to ask a PM a question, and all they talk about is that.
But you see, that's good, because most people in Britain will be walking around blissfully unaware that the western world could be about to go into financial meltdown. Because all they've heard about for three weeks is Rupert Murdoch and his evil empire, and how the nasty man wants to rule the world, and how he personally knew people were hacking into the voicemails of crap actors, singers and politicians. Which is, of course, complete and utter non-sense.
So where usually in this sort financial climate the media would be whipping people into a blind panic that things are going to get so bad and we're all going to be so poor that we'll have to eat our own parents just so we don't starve to death, they are of course concentrating on the breaking news that: The police are corrupt; journalists sometimes tell lies; and politicians sometimes make the wrong decisions. Old news that may just keep us out of a nasty old mess.
Or was it? If you read the papers in 2008 around the time of the Lehman's collapse, they'd have you believing things were going to be about thirty times worse than the great depression of the thirties. Every so called expert in the financial world of London was predicting Armageddon. But it just didn't arrive. Certainly not to anywhere near the extent of what the papers were saying it would.
Before the financial downturn many people in the UK were paying mortgages of between 6-8% on massively overpriced properties. I myself couldn't afford to move to a bigger house. But then the crash that was supposed to end the world came, and the Bank of England slashed it's interest rates. Suddenly homeowners were paying almost half the amount for their mortgage. House prices dropped, which allowed thousands to move home. People were working less hours so they had more time to spend with their families and enjoy some leisure time with the extra money they had in their pockets. Many of the people made redundant that were unhappy in their jobs for years, started their own business. But did the papers report it like this? Of course not. They wrote headlines about national debt and how our grandchildren's grandchildren would still be paying it off.
The media use headlines to scare people all the time. When bird flu was being spread the media reported it in such an extreme way the financial institutes of London had emergency headquarters arranged in the English countyside. Swine flu was the same. That was a classic. Blanket coverage on every 24 hour news channel had the N.H.S set up a help line that people phoned and said they had a headache and felt a bit hot, and the call centre worker on the other end of the phone gave them a week off work! It was amazing how many people got swine flu on a monday morning.
My point is, newspapers and the media in general only get excited over bad news. If B.M.W creates a thousand jobs it'll receive about four lines on page 17 of a paper and be announced just before the weather on the six o'clock news. If Jaguar layoff 200 workers it's front page material and the leading story at 6pm. Which is why the phone hacking story is a god send that may save us from a recession.
Phone hacking, for me, is just not important enough to dominate the news channels for three weeks. It obviously has it's sad and dark elements. Listening to a missing girls voicemails and giving her family false hope that she's alive is beyond contempt. But other than that, I don't care whether Hugh Grant or Gordon Brown had their phones hacked. But because these so called celebrities and politicians are so obsessed with themselves, that's all we've read and heard about. The left wing Labour party have become fixated on destroying Rupert Murdoch, a man who employs over 50,000 people worldwide. Ed Milliband, the leader of the opposition, is determined to make the Prime Minister apologise for remaining loyal to his friend, Andy Coulson, a man who hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, let alone found guilty. And while they concentrate on these important issues, the small matter of Europe ceasing to trade is passing them by.
The Euro as a currency could cease to exist within days. America could miss a debt payment for the first time and go into meltdown. Millions of people in Africa could die of starvation. But what do a 127 MPs want to ask the prime minister about in an emergency session of the House of Commons? Phone hacking of course. That's right. Never in the long history of parliament have so many MP's had a chance to ask a PM a question, and all they talk about is that.
But you see, that's good, because most people in Britain will be walking around blissfully unaware that the western world could be about to go into financial meltdown. Because all they've heard about for three weeks is Rupert Murdoch and his evil empire, and how the nasty man wants to rule the world, and how he personally knew people were hacking into the voicemails of crap actors, singers and politicians. Which is, of course, complete and utter non-sense.
So where usually in this sort financial climate the media would be whipping people into a blind panic that things are going to get so bad and we're all going to be so poor that we'll have to eat our own parents just so we don't starve to death, they are of course concentrating on the breaking news that: The police are corrupt; journalists sometimes tell lies; and politicians sometimes make the wrong decisions. Old news that may just keep us out of a nasty old mess.
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