Max Watson retweetou
Morrisons just said the quiet part out loud.
Around 100 convenience stores are now on the chopping block.
Hundreds of jobs are at risk.
And the reason given is not “greedy supermarkets”, not “corporate profiteering”, not “Tory austerity”, not any of the slogans Labour spent years throwing around.
It is “significant cost increases resulting from Government policy choices”.
That is corporate-speak for: Labour made it more expensive to employ people, more expensive to operate, and harder to keep marginal stores alive.
This is the basic economic reality the Government pretends does not exist.
You can raise employer costs and call it “fairness”.
You can increase wage mandates and call it “growth”.
You can load more regulation onto businesses and call it “responsibility”.
You can demand lower prices at the till while making every input cost higher behind the scenes.
But eventually the spreadsheet wins.
And when the spreadsheet wins, shops close.
Not the imaginary shops in a Treasury forecast.
Real ones.
Local ones.
The ones people use for milk, bread, prescriptions, newspapers, top-up groceries and last-minute essentials.
The ones staffed by people who do not have the luxury of working from home while lecturing everyone else about “resilience”.
This is the part Labour never wants to own.
Their policies are always sold as compassion.
But the consequences are brutally practical.
A store that was just about viable becomes loss-making.
A worker who was just about employed becomes “at risk”.
A community that had a local shop now has an empty unit with metal shutters.
And then ministers will stand up and blame “global pressures”, “market conditions”, “corporate decisions” or “the legacy we inherited”.
NO.
Morrisons has named the problem directly: government policy choices.
That phrase matters.
Because it means this was not inevitable. It was chosen.
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