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Great Britain: How Have We Gone From a Nation of Shopkeepers To a Nation of Food Banks?
And Just how did this happen in less than a generation?
It was Napoleon Bonaparte who described Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.
And through various waves of migration, this truth held firm.
It didn’t matter whether the new migrants were Jews fleeing the pogrom from Poland and Russia or Kenyan and Ugandan Asians relocating to the United Kingdom, Britain was all about its shopkeepers.
And when the contrarian daughter of a shopkeeper from Grantham, became Prime Minister in 1979, she had absolutely no qualms in using the analogy of the shop owner in selling her sweeping vision of a new Britain.
As radical as the Thatcherite revolution was, the notion of our country being favourable to small and medium businesses remained true, throughout the 80s and 90s.
While it is also true to state that the effects of the Thatcher’s revolution in the riots which took place at Brixton, Tottenham in London; Croxteth and Toxteth in Liverpool and Handsworth in Birmingham, you always had the abiding impression that Britain’s first woman premier did have something of a social conscience.
And when Tony Blair took over in 1997, his policies ensured continuity…