Five words. That’s all it took to show just how out of touch this Government had become from the realities facing retailers on the ground. At a time when thousands of shops stood empty around the country and consumer confidence was on the floor, David Cameron’s enterprise advisor Lord Young boldly announced, “You’ve never had it so good.”
This was six months into this Parliament back in 2010 and although he went on to resign over these foolish remarks, Lord Young set a tone that has continued over the last five years.
Despite the fact we’ve seen record retail insolvencies, a huge shift in consumer behaviour requiring high streets to urgently adapt to a changing retail landscape and many household retail names disappear forever, there’s been little urgency on the part of Government to support the UK’s biggest private sector employer. Policy has been weak, insubstantial and plain wrong. We’ve had silly high street PR stunts with Mary Portas, which became a reality TV circus. Ministers have cancelled a rates revaluation that means business rates are still calculated on 2008 data and are now totally detached from reality; a move the British Property Federation condemned for embedding unfairness into the system. And at a time when a growing portion of the retail market is shifting online, Britain as a country is still stuck in the digital slow lane. No wonder the Federation of Small Businesses continue to call for more ambitious targets for rolling out high speed broadband to businesses.
The Tories claim to understand the realities facing small businesses; after all Thatcher was bought up in a shop. But under Cameron and Osborne they haven’t got a clue. They’re more interested in hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs who pay £160,000 to play a game of tennis with Boris Johnson.
When I visited David Cameron’s constituency of Witney for a BBC Radio 4 programme retailers told me they felt abandoned by Cameron. “He’s done absolutely nothing for us,” one told me.
Retail feeds off consumer confidence and it doesn’t help that living standards are down and working people are, on average, £1,600 a year worse off than they were in 2010 under Labour. This Government has missed every economic target it set.
In contrast, Labour has made living standards a key policy battleground. And they were also the first party in this Parliament to recognize that business rates were holding business back. Ed Miliband was the first leader to commit to a cut in business rates. Now we need wholesale reform of this antiquated system.
Equally important is that Labour recognizes business has to be embedded in our social fabric. It must be a part of our community rather than a remote offshore entity avoiding tax here. That’s how you get trust on your balance sheet.
The last time we had a Tory Government business almost became a dirty word and a Gordon Gecko ‘greed is good’ culture was celebrated obsessively. This time we have seen the rich and the bankers, who caused the crash in 2008, get richer whilst the so called economic recovery has been at the expense of the working and middle classes. This is no way to build a sustainable economy or a healthy business environment – there is a fairer way and that’s why I’ll be voting Labour on May 7th.
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