In Focus: Relationship issues
As a non-royalist, Friday's event and the excitement surrounding it was lost on me but there is something to be said for a feelgood factor and a combination of warm weather, long weekends and - much as I hate to admit it - that wedding - have left people with a smile on their faces.
In business terms this is very welcome as we desperately need to get some confidence back into the economy and, in simplistic terms, when people are happy with their lot they spend money.
And they are going to have to because an extremely flat retail picture is causing real concern. There are profits warnings galore on the high street and I’m hearing horror stories about major retail schemes in the Midlands where the occupiers haven’t been able to pay their rent for months but the landlords are letting the situation ride rather than face the grim prospect of lots of empty units.
Understandably people are reluctant to rack up huge credit card bills given the still precarious economic situation - the amount we are all having to spend on fuel every month is another factor - but the retail sector needs consumer confidence to improve.
Last week's GDP figures should help. A 0.5 per cent quarterly increase doesn’t amount to pulling up trees (in fact it just takes us back to where we were six months ago) but let’s not quibble. A 1.8 per cent year-on-year increase is a step in the right direction.
And encouragingly for this area manufacturing growth was relatively strong at 1.1 per cent.
What this all suggests is that recovery is going to be a long hard road and it’s unlikely that the government will change its hardline, cost cutting approach at this stage. Thus growth in the economy will have to be self sustaining as there is unlikely to be much in the way of central government support.
It will be interesting to see if this strategy is maintained should the referendum next week return a majority vote in favour of electoral reform. First term governments generally get a bit twitchy half-way through their five-year spell in charge and arguably a Conservative Party propped up by the Lib Dems facing a new election system which most commentators believe won’t do it any favours may well decide it needs to do more to ingratiate itself with the electorate over the next couple of years.
We certainly saw in the recent Budget that repeated criticism about this government being all stick and no carrot have had an effect. It was a Budget containing plans for growth and certainly intitiatives such as the creation of enterprise zones have been welcomed in this part of the world.
Government principles are all well and good but the harsh world of realpolitik tends to come knocking on the door at some point during an electoral term and advisers will be telling the government what it needs to do to maintain the support of a particular part of the population.
All of which should make the next few months very interesting for observers of the political and economic scene. Because, with respect to William and Kate, the ‘marriage’ between David and Nick is the one that is likely to have the biggest impact on our future.
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