Political recession

This 'to let' shop lies in West Niles Street, Glasgow city-centre, a moment from the 'style mile'. Like much of the city's grid system, it's a one-way street, quietish, but boasting a couple of on-trend clothes shops, a Cath Kidston, a men's grooming outlet, a Chinese buffet restaurant, a whisky shop and an upmarket Carluccio's Italian restaurant. Quiet it maybe , but it's not on it's uppers. The passing trade is decent, and all in all it's a handy wee corner of a bustling city-centre. Just two minutes away is the Buchanan Quarter, a multi-million pound mall development under construction.

I half-expected to see a tv news crew pitch up to visual the very common retail doom and gloom story. Yet it would only have told a paragraph of the whole story. Things are tricky for for much of retail but here's the rub. Sometimes businesses fail. Sometimes the business model is poor, sometimes they don't react to the market, sometimes they're poorly run. A few businesses going bust is bad news for employees, not grand for a street's image, but we know there's an online aspect, a Tesco aspect.

And then there's the tax aspect, the banking aspect and the political aspect. This is a politically motivated recession. You have the choice to punish banks and make companies pay taxes (from football clubs to online firms, mobile operators to coffee houses, there's a CSR aspect). Recoup the taxes, fine the banks, chase the evaders and avoiders. It's January, things are generally tough, but is that the whole picture? How about the good news that all around us, all around the 'to let' shops, there's restaurants and clothes shops, specialist retailers and more doing well.

One 'to let' shop image does not give us the whole story.