The Economy

I would argue that the Government's policies in the past year have done nothing to increase the confidence of this country's consumers. The British Retail Consortium and KPMG's retail sales monitor shows that the total value of retail sales last month represented"““the worst drop in total sales since we first collected these figures in 1995…high inflation and low wage growth have produced the first year-on-year fall in disposable incomes for thirty years.””" Worse still, according to the BRC the main cause of inflation is not just wages or consumer-driven increases but external shocks such as the VAT increase.