Our high st is getting run down. Lots off empty shops. Trouble is the shops are owned by a property fund who would sooner see it empty than lower the costs. In order for tenants to stay in the premises they have to sign up to long leases. This is impossible for a small business and thus they are all leaving. A hairdresser i used to use was asked for a 25yr lease plus they put up the rent 25%. Its now been sat empty for over a year. Trouble with the property fund is that they are not local so have no idea of the impact of their decisions. All they are doing is making the whole high st less and less attractive and thus others are leaving and reducing the chance they have for tenants. Shops should be owned by locals who understand the needs of its locals. All weve got a charity shops, fast food and restaurants. We need those handy shops we used to have. Christ i have to drive to a bakers in another town to get decent bread. Plus we lost Caterham Cars. The council permitted the owner of the building to build more retirement flats rather than keep Caterham Cars where it wanted to stay. The casting vote given by someone from miles away and not from here. The short-sightedness of this council is shocking. Its borderline corrupt and wholly incompetent. No. I never voted for them.
Its a nice idea but at what level of local would you draw the line. I would buy a locally produced Ducati if there was one. Go back a very long way and the Hesketh was touted as being that bike and look how well that turned out. If you only draw the line at "local where possible" then you have........ Oh wait, exactly what we have now. What happens when a small country has no resources to speak of and they want to give their citizens cars , fridges and billion dollar drugs to stop them dying of the horrible diseases that plague them? Imagine if we could engineer utopia in britain and we all lived a cozy happy life relying on each others collaboration and everything was cool. But, we knew there were the guys mentioned above that still had a shit life. How does that sit with us ?
Thats how it starts. What better than seeing the guy down the pub you beer your veg from? Or seeing Made in Britain on the tag...
If every country had to make do with its own resources, maybe the issues we have in many countries would no longer exist. Sure some struggle with some component, I'd imagine large parts of Africa struggle for food, but funny how they managed for year and years until the West came along and tried to educate them...
Exactly. World trade has made us rich but also made us wage slaves (lets not get too pedantic about the use of the word slaves here). We can't do without food, which takes a lot of resources to produce, particularly if it is small scale. Those living in the country could feed themselves on an acre of land but what would the 30 million people in the UK who live in cities do ? It is more efficient to feed large populations via supermarkets supplied by 40 ton trucks than a horse and cart.
There's a lot of woolly thinking on this question it seems to me. The economy is all based on consumerism, but as individuals, you don't have to consume. You can buy as local as you like. If there are enough people who want to buy local stuff, that constitutes a market and someone will be along to serve that market. So there is no need for compulsion of any sort. But that isn't what people want is it? People on here often want to spend thousands of pounds to own the latest and best from Bologna, despite the fact that they'd get just as much fun and use out of what they already have. They then spend more thousands tarting the thing up and personalising it. I don't have a problem with any of that, of course, but you have to know it comes with a cost. Those thousands spent have to be worked for, probably in a job where you are doing more hours than you would like and getting more stressed out than you would like. My brother has never really had a wage-paying job. He emigrated to Australia, got a mortgage on a large lump of land, built a house out of mud bricks with mates, and has spent the last 2 decades building more, improving his land etc etc. He's a veggie and grows most of his own food. It's compost loos, water heated by the sun etc. And very nice it is too. But equally, he buys nothing he doesn't have to, and has no interest in owning stuff. His wife works, so it suits them. They now no longer have a mortgage and can still afford air tickets to England to see our folks. So there isn't much point in looking for new organisations, rules and regulations to force people into doing what anyone can do already. It's starts with making your own pizza instead of ringing up Dominos for their shite. :smile:
Don't diss the Dominos... Meanwhile I'm just messing with my new Mercedes which was delivered this morning...
Africa - let em starve. Drugs - we can grow our own Cars n bikes - Triumph and Morgan Gas - bring on the shale beds cocunut milk- hasta la vista thai curry Oil - rapeseed fields of Northumbria (AKA Northern Britain - scotland can go suck on its own) Imigration - turm it into emigration - return to sender, who gives a fuck, your country's shit - and your outta luck. Fish - all welsh girls smell so they can be used as bait.
