We are living in some pretty amazing rough times right now. Where I live in a part of Edinburgh, Leith is it's own little community. But recently after the closure of several big stores in the area, it is noticably quieter in terms of shoppers. a) People are tightening their belts, b) Those who are spending are going to different areas.
So are we looking at ghost town appearing as a result of the situation?
Ghost towns are nothing new. Parts of Lanarkshire for instance never really recovered from Thatcher's rout of the 1980's. And there's a near-unspoken grey band of hopelessness that runs much of length of the M8 and though swathes of Ayrshire. It's not a unique band either. We've come through a relatively and inevitably short boom. I say
relatively short because in embraces much, if not all of the entire working and economic lives of many here today. And I say inevitable because it was a boom of no substance; built essentially on selling off the value in essential infrastructures and bleeding off the 'worth' in essential works.
The family silver is gone. As a nation we no longer own the schools the hospitals nor even aspects of our policing and civil defence. Nor the means of watering or powering our homes nor dealing with our waste. Our manufacturing industries are almost non-existent; having been asset stripped and hived off to whoever. Even our road and transport systems are in chaos because they no longer exist primarily to move goods from point 'A' to point 'B' but to divert resources into the pockets of the few.
Those fact alone mean that as a society we are, in wealth, set back 150 years or more. Children ARE dying on our streets, the sick are going untreated, the criminal unfettered and the ordinary working man is effectively enslaved to the greedy, the feckless and the worthless.
Our high streets are dying because of decades of greed on the part of politicians. Be it in the form of using parking. access or and public transport as a cash cow and making it increasingly expensive and impractical to shop there. Be it screwing the small retail outlets for every bare penny 'till they're driven out of business. Or be it by selling the heart and soul of our communities to the purveyors of the bland worthless tat that fills every dreary cloned 'designer outlet' throughout the land...
Wealth is ONLY created when people do something of worth. When they create something or harvest something or facilitate something that makes such creation possible. And while there is merit some of the time for embracing the economies of scale there is more in realising the strength of diversity.
Simply 'shuffling' money from point a to point b and 'tapping off' a little for yourself isn't creating anything; and certainly isn't creating wealth. At least no more than holding a gun to someone's head is. Holding individuals and communities to ransom isn't creating wealth either.....
We need to get back to making things. To providing REAL services that actually achieve something instead of figuring more perverse ways of extracting 'something for nothing'. We need to end the waste and pointlessness of chasing vacuous statistics. And loose each and every so-called 'manager' who does so by rote and doesn't understand the REALITY of the process they're managing.
And most of all we need to say NO to the greedy, dishonest, lying worthless wasters that have charge of the reigns at the moment. Otherwise it won't be ghost towns we have to worry about. But towns laid waste for generations to come and a society so fractured it will make the Orwellian nightmare seem like paradise.
The sooner we really are
a nation of shopkeepers the better!
