Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

I could tell you that the town that I live in has 6 car parks, and the council has plans to convert at least 3 of them into something else, student flats, shopping areas, flats over shopping areas, whatever, it’s incidental because the real purpose is to discourage cars coming into the town centre.

People up and down the country could read that and think I was talking about where they lived…

To these councillors, walking, riding a pushbike or taking a bus are sufficient, after all, all the shops goods in are teleported in at 2 am, and nobody ever buys anything but a latte to go, and cars are evil.

It’s a “green” thing.

The councillors themselves get elected in local elections, of course only the idle and feckless ever run for election, everyone else is out working, so the process is “democratic” but before we even started everyone who has a job and who isn’t a feckless twat is already self excluded, so we need to bear that in mind for a moment.

When it comes to voting itself turnout / participation is low / low / low, so again it may be democratic that candidate X gets 52% of the vote, but not many voted.

When it comes to the voting itself, it’s people who vote, Jim’s butcher shop doesn’t get a vote, Val’s veg shop doesn’t get a vote, Steve’s newsagents shop doesn’t get a vote, even though the three may form a corner at one end of a shopping street, Jim and Val and Steve might get a vote, if they want to take time off work to go down and vote, they are far too busy trying to make a living to go and stand for election.

So it’s democracy, but local shops and businesses again do not get to participate.

In effect you have a rather small minority of the feckless idle and stupid who stand for election and who vote, et voila, we have local councillors, and their decisions and choices then have the force of law… and remember, these are still basically feckless idle and stupid people, so it’s easy for the local superstore to get planning permission, they are easy to manipulate.

The LOCAL economic heart of the town gets ripped out, to be replaced with pedestrianized snipers alleys populated with national chains of tat, after all, they are the only ones who can afford the rent and business rates charged by the council and the new landlords who built the steel frames modern monstrosities.

What was 100 years ago the local fire station and council offices opposite the old church, and old brick building about 150 foot long and 60 foot deep and two stories high, is now a takeaway, a betting shop and an estate agent, the council now lives in a pair of huge 6 story concrete and glass cubes up the road, with perhaps 150 times the volume and 200 times the staff, all leeching off the citizens and businesses.

Tens and tens and tens of millions of pounds flowing into the council coffers every year, I am not going to call it “revenue” because that implies they have to do some work or some trading and invites confusion with terms such as turnover and gross and net profit margins, whereas this is none of that, it’s just money coming in from stuff like taxes on your house, parking for your car, tax on your business / place of work, etc etc etc

And this is all legal, as in it has the force of law behind it.

So what of the empty shops and premises (and all the “charity” shops count as empty in my book) what happens to them?

Well, when you own 10 shops in a row and you are charging 40,000 per annum rent for each, having 5 of them empty is no reason to drop the rents on the empty ones to 10,000 per annum.

£40k x 10 = £400k, but £10k x 10 = £100k, and with accounting and property rules, and probably your own commercial mortgage, reducing nominal rent = reducing property “value” on paper = declaring yourself bankrupt = not happening.

Meanwhile Jim Val and Steve who own those three shops on the corner and get no say in anything are getting squeezed harder and harder.

I actually knew a chap who had a shop that sold material (dressmaking / curtain / cloth etc) on rolls, I dunno, 450 square feet, a front window that got smashed every year by drunks that the council did nothing about security wise, and they were raising his rent from 39,000 to 41,000 a year, it went up every year, assuming he was open for trading 50 hours per week that’s £15 per hour, EVERY FUCKING HOUR, just for rent, add business rates, add customers with cars being penalized by the council, add light and heat, add stock….

… add the completely alien to the council concept of a profit margin on trading where even on a fat 20% markup (lots of businesses dream of a 10% markup….) you have to sell 5,000 worth of shit to make 1,000 gross profit, so suddenly he has to have the till ringing at the rate of 80-90 quid an hour, and he sold cheap material, I used to buy polyester at 1.25 a metre, a few metres at a time.

He quit, it’s another “charity” shop now…. the place is already saturated with takeaways and betting shops so there was no interest for that, perhaps the only two ways for premises that size to make the rent… there is already a laundromat across the road.

But all these changes are for the better, it’s a green thing, we are getting rid of the evil automobile, and we are all lining our pockets very nicely from doing this important work, thank you very much… and we *must* be doing something right because we have such luminaries as waitrose and john lewis and next and matalan and landmark securities and lloyds bank and vodaphone and apple and everyone else “investing” in our exciting new pedestrian wonderland.

Not one of them is a local firm.

Not one of them is a manufacturing firm.

Not one of them is doing anything except extracting money from the local economy in exchange for a handful of minimum wage part time jobs.

But no matter, they pay the rent and rates that keep the council coffers full… and the councillors and the rest paid.

The local council does a “deal” with tesco and allows them to build a new superstore on what was green belt land, and then the council claims credit for “creating 150 new jobs” in the town.

Meanwhile everything hollows out like an old tree rotting from within, it still looks pretty impressive in summer with a crown of leaves and an impression of stately permanence, but it’s only one winter’s gale away from being sawdust and mulch.

No saplings growing out around it to replace it, because that has been concreted over for pedestrians.

In an insane asylum, the reservoir is no longer being filled but there is still water coming out of the taps so party hearty like it is 1999.

And for all the faults of the old individual units on 2 way streets that were anything from 70 to 700 years old, at least they WERE individual units so there was scope for sapling businesses to move in and take root, now there are only steel framed glass fronted edifices starting at £500k per year rent that only a national chain could even consider financing moving in.

I predict that in years to come large swathes of the new pedestrian precinct will be sold by one party to another party for the sum of one pound, and that will continue until someone blinks and someone else can leverage the liabilities associated with these “assets” away, either by scrapping planning rules and regulations, or ripping up all the pedestrian shit and allowing vehicles back in.

Contrast this to an industrial estate such as I am on, and it is largely defined BY the road structure leading to and from it, roads designed expressly to permit entrance and egress of arctics make for easy access to private vehicles, and the fact is most of the pavements are at least six foot wide too.

And then you look around and see who is moving in, nandos, kfc, sporting goods, gymnasiums, two cafe’s, high street electronics shop, pushbike shop, 5x motorcycle shops (used to be three in the high street in town) and surely and steadily it is turning into everything that the old town centre used to be, minus the “live over the shop” accommodations that used to be there, and that too can be cured with a stroke of the pen in planning permissions.

The more astute would look at this and mutter to themselves that if national chains of consumer shops are abandoning the new car hating pedestrianized city centres and moving out to the car friendly industrial estates (which are largely bereft of heavy goods vehicles evenings and weekends) NOW, then we are already well past the point where the first writing was on the wall, and anyone with any sanity would have started to retrace steps.

Indeed the history of the modern city centre is always that back in the day it was the contemporary equivalent of the industrial estate of today, so all we are seeing is history rhyming again.

Things have just gotten a bit bigger, 150 square metres on a 450 square meter plot is the new 20 foot by 30 foot and accommodations up over in the days of the horse and cart.

The hilarious thing is that the old pre pedestrianised city centre WAS basically built in the era of the pedestrian, and the odd hand or horse drawn cart, the new industrial estate city centres are laid out on a much larger scale entirely, often in places that were once a cattle market or railway yard, outside of town, but which are now the new mecca.

And as far as revenues, there ain’t much to tax in the new industrial estates, no parking permits for residents because there aren’t any, ditto housing taxes, and no services to provide, there aren’t any buses or drop in centres for the transgendered homeless, plus it is still classed as an industrial zone so fuck you very much, and a lot of the tenants are really big, you can afford to lose a department store from the high street, you can’t afford to lose the new amazon warehouse or the regional ford showroom and service centre or the bus company depot and workshops, the boot is on the other foot.

So we will get (like many things, europe lags the usa by a few years) regional and city councils going bankrupt, unable to pay their own wages and pensions, much less fund transgender toilets for ethnic minority midgets.

Bankruptcy is like that reservoir that ain’t being filled no more but the taps still work, when the cash stops flowing out of the taps, everything changes real quick.

If the council gets for example 50 million a year in taxes from local homeowners and business, and the writing is on the wall that the council is going to go bankrupt in six months, ain’t nobody going to pay the council, the body that is going to sue them is going to cease to exist before the lawsuit can ever get anywhere near a court, and you have the equivalent of a bank run.

And several thousand former council employees find out the hard way the essential difference between free money stolen by taxation, and money that has to be worked for as a profit on endeavour and labour.

The last piece was warning you about proper registered companies v being a private individual or sole trader.

This piece is warning you about town/city centres, the whole green / hate cars / pedestrian thing, pretty much doesn’t matter what your business is, if you are just around the corner from a fast food outlet and a car dealer and a gym and a food outlet and a electronics place, your customers are yards away, and increasingly all those places are abandoning city centres and moving out of town to industrial estates.

The last ones to leave the town centres will be the big department store chains that all sell clothes and home furnishings and other tat made for cents in the dollar in china or india or wherever.

Nota Bene, Malls are NOT industrial estates.