These vile creatures have only one answer to everything – steal more money.
The council has made the suggestion under the Sustainable Communities Act, which allows communities and councils to put forward ideas to government to solve local problems.
In its submission, the council says that while supermarkets bring some benefits, they have an overall detrimental impact on the sustainability of local communities.
So, increasing the “local communities'” grocery bill will help, eh? And, frankly, it is not the place of the council to do anything of the kind. Their job is to empty the bins and light the streets, not indulge in social engineering and punish businesses they disapprove of, the vile jackanapes.
“Research has shown that 95% of all the money spent in any large supermarket leaves the local economy for good, compared to just 50% from local independent retailers; this levy is a modest attempt to ensure more of that money re-circulates within and continues to contribute to local jobs and local trade,” its report states.
So what? If local business do not provide what people want for a price they are prepared to pay, then they will not survive. It is not the place of jumped-up local wannabe politicians to artificially distort the market. There is no such thing as “local communities” there are individuals who do business with other individuals and businesses for mutual benefit. None of this is any business of the council and it most certainly should not be taxed so that those local councils get to spend it on those businesses that meet their approval. Tesco et al, provide a product and service people want. Get used to it. If local people wanted to spend money locally then they would. That they choose to use large supermarkets for their own convenience is their business. Get used to that, too.
There isn’t a bunch of officious bastards anywhere in our doomed country that i don’t detest any more.
These council bastards fucked the high streets sideways by treating the solvent shopper as the enemy, yes that swine who can afford to own and run a car.
So lets make it as difficult as possible for him to drive into town, if he’s lucky enough to find a space then we’ll pull his knickers down and shaft him bone dry with ruinous parking charges, hopefully he’ll overstay so we can double bugger him with a fine too, oh whoopee, with a bit of luck he’ll get lost and trigger a box junction or bus lane fine too…ooooh Rupert i’m so excited i’ve peed in me pants.
Meanwhile we’ll make sure the town shopping areas are a haven for all our ne’er do wells, pickpockets muggers chavs and general layabouts, that’ll encourage solvent shoppers to come, diversity thats the key.
Local shops rely on local, and in massive amounts, passing trade, passing as in motorised transport as i don’t see too many urban cyclists with carrier bags of shopping round their necks…so we’ll red route everywhere too, that’ll bollocks the driver again…ha bleedin ha.
Oh yes, lest i forget…toilets…yes those pesky supermarkets almost always provide somewhere cleanish you can have a pee and wash your hands, its now almost impossible to find proper public conveniences, and without doubt any conveniences will be sited somewhere very inconvenient for public enemy number one, the motorist…yes that swine with money to spend.
Yes i know as a council we should be providing public conveniences, but if we get the supermarkets, or McDonalds in town to provide em for us, we can then tax them for attracting customers…and free parking too…how dare they.
By the way, every time i hear the word community i see in my tortured minds eye that bloody Welsh Windbag Kinnock, he was always harping on about them, when he wasn’t getting his arse kicked by Thatcher.
Sod em.
Judd
Judd,
I was going to comment on this, but you’ve done it for me, and better.
Marvellous rant.
Also of note: Preston Council ‘wanting to do more to support Hamas’. WTF. Like LR says, these people are here to empty bins and clean the streets, NOT get involved in international politics.
Cheers.
It also doesn’t help that everyone and his dog insists that nothing must ever, ever, *ever*, be demolished to make way for something better. Heaven forfend that some old bit of 19th century tat be swept away to make way for something that’s genuinely useful.
Never mind that the sodding Victorians were just as prone to cutting corners as every bugger else – I’ve seen some of those terraced houses stripped back to the brickwork and it’s not often you hear a Polish worker swear at the sight of randomly arranged bits of brick, rock and anything else that happened to be to hand wedged so haphazardly into crumbling mortar that you can’t even follow the courses. Some of those houses must be held up mainly by umpteen layers of wallpaper.
The Victorians were well aware of this – they practically invented the cowboy builder, along with the cowboy baker (sawdust in bread, etc.) – and thought nothing of knocking down houses they’d built only 30 or so years earlier to replace them with high-density alternatives. They didn’t have this weird obsession about living in a museum that so many seem to have today.
If you want big, nice, car-friendly shopping in your High Street, be prepared to *adapt* said High Street to suit. You can’t get economies of scale from individual, “indie” shops. That’s why so many corner shops have a big “Londis” logo now. It’s a franchise, so they’re no more independent than a McDonalds.
Preservation and conservation are all very well, but this should be paid for by those who want to do the preserving and conserving. If you can’t raise sufficient interest and funding, it goes. So long, sayonara, bye-bye! There are these things called digital cameras, the Internet, and 3D scanning now; you can’t seriously claim that anything we knock down from now on will be “lost forever”. Google and Facebook prove that.
And now for my pills.
Indeed. Pass the pills to me.
And this of course from the very people who forced us out of town in the first place with limited parking, exploitative fines and penalties, and visitor hostile traffic schemes.
It’s a ridiculous concept to tax supermarkets further of course this tax will be passed on to the shoppers, making food even more exorbitant.
I am contemplating keeping a cow and a few chickens in the back garden plus growing a few veg just so we can afford to eat.
Personally I would rather look at a lovely old Victorian building than a brand new Mcdonalds, at least the victorian building does not cause droves of littler. bits of pickle, tomato sauce, chips and sticky milkshake cartons all over pavements.
Guess it’s just a matter of personal choice.
And this, of course is the point – the supermarkets won’t pay the tax, those precious mythical “local communities” will. Of course, the precious mythical “local communities” won’t do as their betters expect of them and shop in supermarkets rather than more expensive artisans and delis. The bastards. So it needs the council to correct therm.
@Various – In addition to parking and other motorist / solvent shopper* unfriendly schemes are two others, designed explicitly to encourage out-of-town retail parks – local business rates and rental rates.
In some places these are additionally skewed by the council’s idea of “good” shops (charities, franchises) vs “undesirable” shops (large, profitable supermarkets, diy, etc).
Caught in this mess are the small local businesses, forced to raise prices to uncompetitive levels to defray these, and other costs – e.g. rent. A lot of them rent from private companies, which charge extortionate rates. Yes, that’s a private contract between two businesses, but underneath are the soiled hands of the council encouraging and facilitating it**.
“The council wants the right to impose a levy on large supermarkets, retain the money raised, and use it to help small businesses. It said it could also use the money to support community centres and parks.”
So steal more from profitable enterprise they don’t like, use it to pay the council taxes of those they do (i.e. money laundering), and use any surplus to fund non-essential, but publicly visibly services. And the laundered money? Well, see, there’s this big ol’ council pensions deficit that needs mending. Et al.
I can’t be bothered to continue with a proper fisking;
Bill Grimsey – useful and naive idiot;
Mark Williams – probably misquoted, but the right idea to use rates instead of levies (ie less tax, not more);
DCLG response – “We ruled out such a bid for higher taxes under the last round … [of] proposals,” (so they’ve been tried this on before, then and will likely keep doing so until they get it).
On the other hand, if it’s social engineering they want…..Let them have it. Pick one or two of the councils, and let them have what they want, with the proviso that nowhere else gets to try it for at least n years (5, 7, 10, take your pick). And if the the affected businesses respond by either raising prices to extortionate levels*** or abandon these areas completely (either way, writing off any losses against their tax liability)? If we’re lucky they’ll do it en masse…
* And not just solvent shoppers, it would apply to anyone for whom glue is not essential shopping
** Don’t have this research to hand, so treat as anecdotal.
*** More fun – If I had to raise prices as a result of this, I’d be certain to itemise that on the customer receipt.
DIY stuff £70, VAT @ 20 %, Local Tax @ 8.5% Total £nn (too lazy to work out the numbers).
Well, 100% of what I buy stays with me. That’s the idea. I buy what I want at a price I’m prepared to pay. These idiots want to tax successful businesses even more and then prop up unsustainable, failing businesses that people are shunning. This is ludicrous. Supermarkets and on-line shopping are here to stay. The only useful shops will be hairdressers/barbers, coffee shops and those dealing in entertainment and probably garden centres which of course are not high street material. Councils have to realise that by jacking up parking charges to ludicrous levels, painting yellow lines everywhere even when they do not help traffic flow and needlessly pedestrianising vast tracts of city centres is actually what doesn’t help these ailing high street businesses. Add ridiculous levels of council tax for zero services plus trying to fine motorists as well and you have a perfect storm. I’m sure not all these idiot councils are run by the Labour party but I expect most of them will be. They don’t have a clue about running a business or how markets work. May they all rot from the inside.
“Research has shown that 95% of all the money spent in any large supermarket leaves the local economy for good”
Do you really expect me to believe that staff salaries constitute less than 5% of spend? What a load of bollocks. And in any case basing it on spend is pontless – what about calculating based on margin?
This “research” if anything proves how corrupt and useless these councils are. They can’t even get the sums right. Cretins…
Odd, isn’t it, that these wretched councils have just now thought to tax all these huge supermarkets, having in the first place given them planning permission to exist in their areas and thus eliminating all the little local shops in the process. Taxing the supermarkets now won’t cause a rush of local people back to local shops, because virtually all of the local shops have vanished. It’ll just mean more money for greedy local councils to waste, the remaining profit vanishing “out of area” just as it does now and the precious “local communities” still with no choice but to shop there!
I prefer to pay cash for small works on my house. I do so simply to keep my “local” money disappearing up the M1 or down the M4. Tax becomes theft when benefits recipients pay 50 percent tax. Others are taxed at close to seventyfive percent. My local pub has stopped taking vegetables and firewood in exchange for beer. That will change soon.