Wendy WilliamsIS it any wonder that people get confused about the true financial state of the nation?
We have just spent the last six months being bombarded by the melt-down of European economies, the explosion of national debt, company closures and mass redundancies, rising levels of unemployment and the spectre of a looming depression but what was the headline news in the run-up to Christmas?
It was the fact that high street shops reported a downturn in retail sales.
A tearful spokesman for the Retail Federation of NSGB said that the total for this year’s Christmas takings would be the lowest since 1637 and that massive discounting might not be enough to save a number of high profile companies.
Cue pictures of closing down signs, boarded-up shop fronts and tumbleweed blowing down Oxford Street.
What on earth did these numbskulls expect? We’ve just lived through months of hand-wringing by government ministers, financial commentators predicting more doom and gloom by the hour, riots in the streets about budget cuts and creeping inflation.
Did the shopkeepers really think that Joe Public would ignore it all and go on a lavish spending spree?
The retailers have proved themselves as daft as the budget-cuts protesters and the strikers complaining about their publicly-funded pensions.
Not one of them has asked the fundamental question: Where is the money coming from?
Well Bartie,
why not ask the question – where do the huge bonus/salaries come from to pay the glutinous pigs that work for RBS/Lloyds – that’s right the poor PAYE mugs who actually pay tax.
Why not ask why the PAYE mugs had to shoulder a £400 million hit on selling Northern Rock to Ricky Branson – strange you missed including these facts.
From the late 1950s the elite in the UK looked at how the ordinary American was being brainwashed into consumerism and set about doing the same in the UK by the middle 60s. By the end of the 70s they had acheived their objective.
So if everybody suddenly woke up and stopped buying the irrelevant crap which gets them into debt the economy would crash completely and what then?
I don’t think we need anymore black/red shirt revolutions do we?