It’s called progress. There is still a place for retail shops but it is a different experience. I’m personally a lover of books and whilst I do buy books online only if I can’t get them in my local bookstore.

Bookshop and other retailers must learn to innovate and offer a different experience to their customers and not one based on price or availability ( read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson for full story here).

However here is the rank stupidity of the low intellectual level of dogma followed by local councillors ( or to placate Jean the EU and Labour govt.)

Business rates are increasing and exactly what services do councils provide? They don’t even empty the bins for businesses

They are vehemently anti car ( my Tory council are now refusing PP for shops/offices with parking spaces!!!!!!) How on earth are our staff and customers going to use these retail facilities?

They are totally enamoured with High St “brand names” offering incentives to open shops ( so we have 3 branches of Next, 3 Topshops, 2 Boots) and almost no independent one off shops.

Town centre is a no go area after dark, so restuarants, coffee shops and other social shopping experiences just don’t happen.

The head office of my company is on the High st of my town. We have our building daubed with spray paint, human “fluids” of every kind , the windows ( and two times the door) put in EVERY week.
Two Mondays ago my finance manager arrived to find a dead body on the front door step ( stabbed in a fight it turned out) this is the second murder outside our premises in 5 years. This is a rural county town for heavens sake. Policing???? There is a rumour that we have some but no one has actually confirmed a sighting yet. We do have wall to wall parking enforcement officers, PCSO’s ( sorry we don’t do SOC).

However we get a brilliant glossy monthly magazine from our Borough Council telling us how lucky we are to live and work in this utopian town which hits all of its diversity targets and runs its disadvantaged workshops and street theatre co-ordination teams ( we don’t actually have any street theatre as it would contravene health and safety obviously but if we did it would be brilliantly co-ordinated by the 8 person team)

And of course the flag ship of the borough the Town Centre Initiative, which involved closing all the central roads to traffic and pedestrianising them adding 30 minutes to a 20 minute journey on the gridlocked one way system. However we had some wonderful street furniture installed following the 20 person two week fact finding tour to Tuscany. Trouble was the week after they were installed a stolen car ( forgetting, no entry signs) plowed into the furniture mangling it. It has now been like it 4 months with some Police tape wrapped round it and a large council sign saying not in use.

Sorry that turned into a rant but I’m totally fed up with”local democracy”.

I have no desire to be rude to you but I can only conclude that you defend this situation because you are or have been a local councillor. However, I expect someone standing for public office to represent the people to do just that, represent The People. Certainly I have not heard one local politician campaign, get angry, write to the press or in all my correspondence with my councillors use the central diktat issue as a reason why things are the way they are. Now I suspect there is a very large element of truth in what you say but that makes my anger worse why is this not being highlighted? What are the councillors scared of? Oh it wouldn’t be that they could be reported and thrown out thereby losing their cushy little taxpayer funded status…..could it?

It appears we are going to continue the same discussion ad nauseum. You are right about red tape, but these businesses closed because their customers were prevented from parking by the petty actions of a Conservative council. Yes we will vote them out again.

As you say though whats the point in local councillors they have no say and don’t represent the ratepayer anymore but the EU and central government.

What would be really brilliant would be a political party who campaigned on a platform of changing this situation.

Will a Conservative, Lib Dem or any other Government have any different diktats? (OK, Greens will get rid of all the spaces)

If all councilors can do is rubber stamp central Governement decisions why bother voting for any of them?

And an observation:

Our council could have left things as they were. But they wanted to provide “enhancements”, that’s cobbles instead of tarmac. The price of cental gov assistance was to cut parking spaces.

Councillors inhabit the same IT world as the rest of us; ‘nice developers with their Section 106 bribes’ understand Councils are powerless against methods of operation under the Labour Brand.
The ‘ruling party’ continues to dictate and control planning.

The good thing about living in a democracy is that you can vote Council members ‘out’ as well as ‘in’.

Nulabor continues to encourage ‘out of town’ superstore monopolies and ‘out of town’ housing developments. It’s method of community funding is based on ‘politics’, not community need.
Conservative run Councils are always allocated the lowest funding possible.