TESCO - Extracts from a report by Magnus Linklater
- The Times on Wed 26 April 06: “And yet the Tesco
effect, with its all-embracing culture of cheap food and wider choice, poses
a greater threat to the economies of local communities than any single
commercial development of recent times.
Whenever it moves in on small towns, the life-blood is steadily
drained from their high streets, small businesses are undermined and the
network of local suppliers and traders on which communities depend is
broken.“ “Yet most local authorities lean over backwards to give Tesco the planning approval it needs, believing that the
arrival of one of its stores enhances the standing of a town and meets the
needs of its residents. Tesco smooths the path by
offering small "planning gains" — a new road, a refurbished
depot, a car park — in return for development approval. Once installed,
however, it is omnivorous.” The following paragraphs are from the NumberWatch
site: “Survival
of the fittest
They say that
some mammalian mothers, if disturbed, will kill their offspring. So, many
local authorities, under intolerable pressure from above, are killing the
communities for which they are responsible. They have been forced into this
position by an incompetent and interfering central government. They are
competing with each other to destroy the economies of their own
neighbourhoods. If they fail, they will be punished by the very government
that put them in this position. The reason
for the panic is that they have been left in the firing line as the
instigators of the most rapidly increasing and unjust tax since danegeld. The
British government, which is wholly responsible with its burgeoning
micro-management and targets, has enforced a continual above-inflation rise
in council taxes for years. The main sufferers are (as always) those on fixed
incomes, such as pensioners, and those in precarious rural communities. A
representative from the (remote) administrative centre visited your bending
author’s small Wiltshire town in an attempt to explain the pressures
that the authority was under and to survey the possible painful cuts and
impositions that were being considered. One was the introduction of total pay
car parking. He was talking to representatives of a dying community. The signs were all there. The bookshop went
first, then the petrol station. The main employing businesses were closing
down (one this very month). The only bank has just announced (this very
month) that it would be closed for two days a week. A major (but not sole)
cause of all this was the imposition of parking restrictions, which serve no
other purpose than to provide income for the authority. There is a stretch of
single yellow line that is there for no reason other than to create income
for the council during the strategically timed visits from the
“Ambassadors” (Yes, believe it or not, that is the Orwellian
title they give to their itinerant tax collectors). Green fields are giving
way to new housing estates, overpriced rabbit warrens in areas where there is
virtually no possibility of anyone earning an honest living. Anyway, there
was a question and answer session. All the questions and answers could be
reduced to a simple common form: Q. Why do you
not behave in a more rational way? A. Because of
Government targets. The Dorset
town of It is a good
thing to provide housing for people, but where are they supposed to earn a
living? Meanwhile, Dorset is to be the site of one of the most obtrusive wind
farms in Who is the
one man behind all this? It is none other than Old Two-Jags, John Prescott. Politicians
are, on the whole, a pretty unappetising bunch, but there are few with no
redeeming features and our John is one of them. We have referred previously
to some of his activities, missionary and pugilistic (try the Number Watch
search facility), but some of his more recent activities beggar belief. He is
one of the biggest evaders of the onerous tax that he himself has
imposed on his suffering countrymen. Even in the ruling country he is despised. He is notorious for
his inarticulacy, blaming the old
education system being his prime and unconvincing defence, but you would
think that a degree in Economics and Economic History at the Try Googling “John Prescott” with “I will
have failed” or search his name in An Englishman’s castle or Tim Worstall. Obviously, it
is unkind to say that he has no redeeming features, perhaps he is kind to
earwigs or something, but if you had to sum up the ills of modern society in
one man, look no further.” |
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