Ha ha, happy days are here again

It is the evisceration of the traditional high street that sees bargain basement stores, charity shops and pawn brokers springing up to take the place of more august institutions.  The Co-Operative used to have a bit of an empire at one end of Gillingham High Street, closest to the railway station with a two-storey department store on one side of the street and directly across it the standard supermarket.  The department store was the first to go, now the habitat of Wilkinson, Sports Direct and Bon Marche (the latter come and gone again) and then the Co-Op relocated to the other end of the town high street having bought the Somerfield chain (which in Gillingham had taken over from Safeway) and in its original place sits now the more downmarket Nisa.
However, when pawn shops close, it may be a sign that things are on the way up.  Albemarle Bond has ceased its Gillingham operations, consolidating in its Chatham branch.  Pawn brokers do not do very well when economic times are good (for no-one needs much to pawn their items) or catastrophic (for no-one can afford to redeem their items and storage is not cheap).  The latter seems to have come over Gillingham at least fleetingly.
Today, earnings were reported to have outstripped inflation for the first time in four years and the British economy is growing the fastest out of all the most developed countries in the world.  It is a disaster for the Labour Party who were riffing on a cost-of-living crisis.  Of course, Labour can claim that the success is unevenly spread, concentrating in the south of the country, but Labour already had much of the north sewn up already - if it is to hold power without the need for a coalition it needs to makes inroads into the south, into places like Gillingham (and Rainham) that it held between 1997 and 2010.  A year to the election, Labour has just seen its trump card over-trumped by the Tories and now needs some big-hitting headlines.