Keir Starmer’s come up a £5bn plan to save lots of YOUR excessive road – right here’s why it is doomed | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Parents scramble for last-minute buys, kids pack round Santa’s grotto and Wizzard blares out over the procuring centre audio system. It’s Chriiiiisssstmas! As a youngster in a northern city, I vividly keep in mind these £5-pocket cash bus journeys to purchase presents.  The excessive road and procuring centres have been a chaotic riot of tinsel and tack, filled with mafting-hot consumers with woolly hats stuffed into their pockets.

Wow, how issues have modified. Now the crowds have thinned to a well mannered trickle. All the massive hitters of the excessive road have moved out of city. Marksies? Gone. Debenhams? Gone. And Next? Yep, that’s gone too. And I do know we’re not alone.You can’t flip again time – and I really like the comfort of Amazon Prime as a lot as the following individual – however to see the excessive road die this gradual and painful loss of life breaks my coronary heart.

You’d suppose this is able to be Keir Starmer’s second. It’s absolutely his alternative to show he cares about locations outdoors of Westminster. Instead, we’re given his £5billion plan for ‘Pride of Place’, encouraging communities to purchase empty city centre outlets and giving councils extra energy to dam vape outlets, “fake” barbers and betting outlets. It’s simply window dressing.

New companies wanted to fill empty models can’t thrive if Chancellor Rachel Reeves continues to show the screw – first by hammering them with National Insurance contributions for workers and now by issuing yet one more diktat for increased wages that I’m positive they’d love to provide, however are struggling to afford. He’s dwelling in an financial dreamland.

The Tories have grasped the urgency. We’re calling for enterprise charges to be wiped for all excessive road outlets and pubs. Well, wouldn’t that be a superb begin? Sadly, we don’t know who’s going to be in energy come the following election, and that assist was wanted yesterday.

Meanwhile, retail parks are a Shangri-La of free parking and security, with even the slightest little bit of beef nipped within the bud by hefty safety guards. By distinction, our city centres have grow to be laughing shares the place drug-addled criminals stroll out and in of outlets, with their arms full of products.

If we need to give city centres even a preventing probability, central authorities should let councils scrap parking prices and fund devoted groups of excessive road law enforcement officials to deal with not simply the thefts however intimidation and dysfunction. And as a substitute of Labour’s obsession with shoving identikit homes on each inch of our inexperienced fields, let’s make properties in vacant excessive road properties: a few of that are gorgeous Victorian buildings left to rot. As effectively as plugging the housing hole, they might give companies much-needed footfall.

But have you learnt what? Let’s not financial institution on Starmer doing any of these issues. So even when it’s simply as soon as this December, make a journey into city, seize a pint and a few grub and choose up some presents. Be that little little bit of Christmas magic that your High Street so desperately wants.