There won’t be a German Market in Leeds this year, and the council have announced that Bonfire Night festivities are not taking place either. I am pretty gutted about both, and I would not have gone to either.
The reasons Leeds City Council have given for the market not happening are ‘the cost of foreign visas’ and ‘council spending cutbacks’. So the first is a direct impact of Brexit and the second due to the government cutting funding for councils.
I’ve never been to the German Market, and I don’t think I would enjoy it much, but there are plenty of people who do. Also, any event that attracts a lot of people to the city centre is good for the local economy.
I don’t write many posts ranting about the government, because it’s so obvious that they are destroying everything in their path, it seems trite to even mention it. I was actually halfway through reading an article in the LRB about the disastrous long term consequences of Truss and Kwarteng’s economic policies when I heard that she had resigned. I do not subscribe to the Conservative ideology anyway, but this is a particularly dark and toxic form of Conservatism. The most laughable thing is that their policies and decisions do not even uphold the economic model they supposedly stand for. There’s some weird cognitive dissonance going on there. Or more likely some very sinister deceit. Or both. The weirdest part of it all is taking in the strange nonsense that spouts from the mouths and keyboards of back bench Tory MPs, and wondering what they honestly are hoping for. Lia Nici, for example (Tory MP for former longstanding Labour seat, Great Grimsby), will not be one the few who may benefit from all this.
It’s not a great long term plan, at any rate. If everything collapses into ruin and there is nothing to keep the economy circulating, then even the very rich will eventually suffer. Perhaps that is ‘the trickle down effect’ that awaits us all; the slow disintegration of absolutely everything…