Money Programme, Mary Portas...

[johnt]

Watching Mary Porta’s staggering up and down the streets of Tewkesbury, and listening to the very real concerns of retailers bemoaning the lack of retail in their small high St shops and boutiques, got me thinking.

There seems to be a big problem in our country today. Thirty years ago only the upper middle classes and the very rich could afford to shop daily as a leisure past time. The country’s financial infrastructure was based largely on manufacturing.

Since the eighties our economy has boomed becoming increasingly reliant on banking, leisure, gaming, and all manner of retail sales and support services. The level of this form of economic trade has grown three fold since the early seventies. By comparison skilled trades today account for a third of the economic output of the same time.

So how has this happened? Well these changes were a result in part because of the liberalisation of the UK economy with the dropping of import barriers, foreign exchange controls, monetary fine-tuning policies, and deregulation of the financial institutions on which we depend.

This has meant of course that banks could start speculating 'securitising' there capital, and so lend long term increasingly risky debt to the likes of you and me, which in turn has meant we can borrow more on increasingly expensive housing, from which we can derive equity and borrow endlessly on credit.

Now that this dreadful unsustainable mess has unravelled amongst our ankles, it's easy to see how dependant, our economy has become on this massive shift in our culture and lifestyle.

So here's the rub, if we cut back and start living a richer productive life, instead of filling our lives with endless materialistic junk, the economy will never recover. Or continue as we have done over the last generation in the vein hope that we can spend our way out of recession and learn nothing.

These are complex issues that predictably were lost in the programs closing moments which showed the people of Tewkesbury optimistically making their way around a special one day open market, in an attempt too encourage customers back onto the high street.