In layman’s terms Britain was in recession, rapidly heading down the economic toilet and once again decided sleeping with enemy, or taking a bold step towards Churchill’s vision of a United States of Europe, depending on your view, seemed like a jolly good idea.
Brexit and British Industry
Now, thanks to the 2016 referendum we have voted to leave. Not because Britain has become such a fierce economic force that we no longer need the EU, quite the opposite. We have barely recovered from the monumental crash in 2008 that has weeded out so many familiar high street names through the effort of trying to keep pace with today’s high tech marketplace, when investment was the last thing on their mind.
Do we mourn the decline and fall of such stalwart British high street names as Woolworths, Blockbuster, HMV, Jessops, C&A and Jaeger? Of course we do and I’m sure the 138,000 plus ex-employees to date would agree it’s a bit of a bad do. Ok, I know, some of them have reappeared on the online marketplace, but it’s hardly a shop with window displays you can press your nose against, doors you can barge through, cash registers, assistants you can summon and racks of stuff you can run your hand over. There are sections of our Society who have barely come to terms with the telephone, are blissfully unaware that the fax was ever a real thing and don’t know anything about computers beyond the vision of dystopian fiction. Internet shopping, or online anything else for that matter simply isn’t British. We should all be riding our bicycles with baskets on the front down the High Street in Miss Marple on the Wold and waving at policemen, then discussing the weather while the grocer wipes the maggots of the side of bacon before he slices us a quarter pound.