I am a strong advocate of the benefits of immigration in general.

Many great nations have been built by the influx of immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families.  The USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are all examples of a list which is almost endless.

As a keen football fan, I have learnt that geographical boundaries can be tweaked.  We have Israeli teams in the European Champions

League and Turkish sides like Galatasaray with billionaire owners looking to win that trophy!

But, when did Turkey, the gateway to the East, make the case for being designated as a part of Europe?

My views on the EC are robust.  It is too big, too bureaucratic and too inefficient.  It should simply be a tariff free, free trade area with free movement of labour and capital.

But, and there is a big but, we have a major problem in the UK with accommodating our burgeoning population.  Britain might look like the Promised Land to many migrants prepared to work hard and haul themselves out of their current life in search of a better one.  But, how many of them can we sensibly accommodate?

The UK in 2013 is not the USA in the first 30 years of the 20th Century, nor is it Australia in the 1950’s with its £10 ticket and a six-week cruise to a new land of great opportunity for hard working migrants.

Last year’s results of the UK census indicated a current population of over 63 million, which is 7% up on the 2001 figure.  The forecast is for that number to rise to 68 million+ by 2020.

Hello?  63 million is the number of people who elected to fulfil their civic duty and complete the census forms, but what about the many who chose to stay under the radar?

A population increase of 10 million in just 20 years on this small island is alarming.  Where on earth are they all going to live?

We have built nothing like the right number of new homes in the UK in the last five years to accommodate our escalating population.  And, net immigration is a big factor in the growth in the population numbers.

Rampant racists in the 1970’s used to tell dark and apocryphal stories of Asian immigrants using bedrooms on a three-shift basis.   That use of bedrooms might become reality if we don’t take decisive action now.

We need an urgent stimulation in house building and we really need it now.

The platitudinous words of the current government about relaxing planning laws need to be replaced by deeds.  Actions speaking louder than words.

On this issue, this government is, to use the vernacular, all mouth and no trousers.

We need to restrict the free flow of labour across our borders, apart from where there are professional skill shortages.  We need to put the brakes on immigration.

This is not racist or bigoted.  If we were heading in the right direction, how come the second most common first language of a UK resident is now Polish?

I have yet to meet a Pole who wasn’t hard working, cheerful and positive.  Certainly not feckless.  But, we have got more than enough until we sort out our problem of not building enough homes for our current population in the UK.

We need a clear plan to dramatically increase our house building and currently there is nothing on offer.

Regular readers might recall that in September I called for a new high-speed link from Manchester to London going via Manchester airport. It now has a name -HS2. Because I am not a NIMBY, I proposed that it should run south towards Crewe and through my home village of Chelford.

The reaction of those potentially affected by HS2 has been extraordinary.

We have had NIMBY nutters wailing like banshees and threatening to throw themselves on the line to halt the retro technology of the high-speed railway train.

I am frankly surprised that they haven’t called for a new Red Flag Act in order to compel the new trains to tiptoe through their own patch at 10mph!

The most brilliant and exciting piece of hardware in my lifetime was Concorde and we killed it.

Figuratively speaking, it never got off the ground because the Greens and the 70’s Tree-Huggers lobbied hard around the world against supersonic flight over land. They objected to the supersonic boom when the speed of sound was broken.

So, Concorde only ever flew to New York and Rio from Europe – both destinations for which the majority of its flight time was over open water.

It never got a chance to revolutionise the travelling time to Australia.

The Luddites must be ignored.  We live in a functioning democracy and whilst the rights of the individual are important, they should not be valued above the greater good of the many.

The business case for HS2 is overwhelming for both the North and South.

Commuting between both regions will be dramatically quicker than currently many London commuters spend on their daily journey to work.

This is the Big One.

The capital infrastructure challenge should be embraced and facilitated.

Journos love an easy tag, don’t they?  A way to sum a whole concept or volume up in one or two words – preferably ending in gate!

Well that’s all the “fiscal cliff” is.

The summation of the continuing dilemma in a recession-ridden world about whether to try and pay down your borrowings and get lean and hard through fasting and restraint, or to get confidence and growth stimulated through not balancing the books and hoping that a rising GDP will solve the problem through increasing tax revenues organically by virtue of a bigger tax take on bigger earnings and bigger company profits.

Personally, I am a “spend your way out of recession” man, but there are arguments both ways.

It’s a macro (big numbers) national and international problem, not a micro (i.e. closely and directly affecting you) issue.  You can’t affect it, so play the games with your cards in your hand because you can affect the things going on around you.

Incentives that are properly thought out work and you can expect more back in sales profits than you spend on incentives if you do it right.

The very first one you do is always the most successful – through novelty and interest.  Don’t incentivise the performance on what you expect to get through the regular package.  It must be for producing more.

My book, Dirty Business, has a lot to say about incentivising and motivating your team that you will find useful, but in brief summary, your incentive schemes should have the following straightforward guidelines:-

1. Be easy to understand and measure.  If I accrue target/standard A, then I receive reward B on date C.
2. Keep the carrot close to the donkey’s nose.  Rewards that pay out after 12 months or six months after your year accounts are audited are no incentive at all.  If I do something above standard or target this week, I want rewarding next week please.
3. Honour your deal, even if your team or individuals in it absolutely blow their targets away.  No ceilings, no retrospective capping of what they might earn.
4. Cash is far and away the best thing to put up as an incentive.
5. Finally, regular recognition, public praise and congratulations does wonders for motivation.  Give it regularly and freely.

Junk TV. Don’t you just love it?  Especially all the excruciating rubbish like I’m A Celebrity!

My hypersensitive gag reflex wouldn’t get me anywhere in a bush tucker trial.  I would throw up just getting a whiff of some of the stuff that they eat.

And, the public phone voting is the 21st century version of wooden stocks isn’t it?  Public humiliation and ridicule.  Never mind Nadine, there are dozens more public figures that I would enjoy teasing mercilessly!

So, any suggestions for personalities and suitable trials for them would be welcome in my postbag!!

But, what is the business angle?   Where is the money?

30 years ago Leonard Rossiter starred on TV in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and his character built a successful chain of stores deliberately selling absolute rubbish.

Reggie called his chain “Grot” shops when the word “grotty” was a popular synonym for awful.

Enterprising young bucks should right now be looking at sourcing the disgusting stuff they eat in the show in Australia and selling it on the web for raunchy parties.  Quick-frozen, portion-controlled, flash-fried kangaroo testicles, ready to microwave in two minutes!

They should be setting up the 21st-century version of the hotdog stand in suitable locations – university campuses spring readily to mind.

Plus, what about serving the stuff at themed parties? People like to get up in fancy dress – tarts and vicars, Eurovision etc.  What about an “I’m a Celebrity” party?

Dingo dick with barbecue sauce sounds like a real treat for a Hallowe’en adult party.

Think of the forfeits you could set up for alcohol fuelled adult party games!  The possibilities are endless!

Answers on a postcard please or email David at david@dirtybusinessbook.com.

You couldn’t make it up could you? In the region that hosts the home of British cycling, national hero, Olympic champion and Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins gets knocked off his bike popping out from home for a pint of milk.

It’s time for a major rethink on how we all get around together in Manchester. There are three incompatible and competing groups who need to share the same space on the ground – pedestrians, cyclists and motorised vehicles.

Motorist despise bolshy cyclists and an irritating minority of cyclists think that they are a law unto themselves. Pedestrians perambulate the boulevards in fear and trepidation of both.  And that’s without even drawing our trams and buses into the discussion.

Cycling in cities does seem to be the future and we need a massive shift in attitudes and perceptions to accommodate it.

Mrs Hughes likes her cultural city breaks and I get lots of brownie points for tagging along without moaning.

Recently we have been in both Bruges and Seville city centres where all three competing groups of travellers seem to get along together just fine.

Where they need to be separate they are and when they can share the same space they do. Cyclists and pedestrians both use what we in Manchester would call pedestrian spaces. Why shouldn’t cyclists ride on the pavement, provided they do so sensibly and at moderate speeds?

Currently the Highway Code absolutely forbids it.

It is the impatient, boy-racing, kamikaze bike courier flouting all the rules who most upsets pedestrians and vehicle drivers. Plus, the new breed of MAMILs (middle age men in lycra) who seem to want a PB (personal best) every time they straddle a bike.

Surely we can jump on both those groups hard for the benefit of everyone else – sensible cyclists included?

Potty mouthed Chief Whips, Boris, Paxman: they are all at it.

Getting around cities on bikes.

My own son bikes to work every day in central London. It takes him 15 healthy minutes, if you ignore the fumes, rather than 30 by tube.

So what’s the business angle?  Where’s the money?

Well, Halfords has already seen a surge of sales in a post-Olympic euphoria with a big uplift in demand for bikes and the associated accessories.  I know one Wilmslow bike shop that has a pushbike on sale for £15,000. Yes, £15,000! Even Halfords sell them for up to £1700.

So wake up and smell the coffee.

It’s a 21st century transport revolution and it isn’t what we thought it would be.

Just think of the civil contracts available for converting city centre space into bike lanes and shared pavements.

There’s a business there supplying what people want and at the same time creating peace on our pavements where previously there was none.

David slammed Mary Portas’ recommendations for the future of the High Street at an event in Manchester – read more here http://ow.ly/f1hno

Boris is likeable, isn’t he?  He carefully cultivates the image of the buffoon, but he is a razor sharp politician.

These days, he is the only man in politics who is instantly known just by his christian name and he is an effective Mayor for London, with an eye for the PR opportunity.  The new Barclays sponsored rental bike system in London will forever be known as “Boris bikes”.  The media just love him.

But, he is the leading counsel for our opposition.  He is bad news for the North West.  Mischievous for Manchester.  Poisonous for Preston.  He could never be loved in Liverpool for his previous insults to Liverpudlians anyway.

Sometime in the next 20 years, Boris wants to build an airport island in the Thames estuary to cater for the rising volumes of people who need to fly into the South East.

Easily my biggest personal pet hate is Heathrow Airport.  I despise it.  Will do almost anything to avoid passing through it.  Seeking to make connections, dashing though terminals, Heathrow is stressful and invariably running late.

I have been known to go to LA from Manchester via Zurich, to Rio from Manchester via Paris and to Ecuador from Manchester via Madrid.  The list is long.  I hate Heathrow and Gatwick isn’t far behind.  Hell is a sleepless overnight flight into Heathrow and then having to hang around for three or more hours to make a connection up to Manchester.  Where I can, I try very hard to travel direct to my destination from Manchester.  It seriously annoyed me that BA stopped flying to New York from Manchester two years ago.

In seeking to build “Boris Island”, Boris is fighting London’s corner.  But where is the lobby for Manchester?

Rather than massive increases in airport capacity in the South East, we need to spread capacity more widely through the country.

The BBC coming to Salford was a gnat on the back of an elephant when compared to the benefits of a bigger and better airport and transport network capacity being built in the North West.

I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that London’s capacity problems could be solved by investment in Stansted Airport and by building a new bullet train link from it into the new and sparkling Stratford Interchange.

Investing in infrastructure in the North West would provide the genuine facility to redistribute wealth, enterprise and employment beyond the South East.

I would invest in Manchester Airport and do two other things.

1) Add a decent motorway standard link from the airport to the M6 for southbound travellers by massively upgrading the A556 from the Lymm roundabout to the Knutsford M6 junction and

2) Build a fast intercity rail link to the south out of the Manchester Airport train terminal, to join to the existing Wilmslow to Crewe line, somewhere around Chelford or Jodrell Bank.

I would stop sending trains out of Manchester to London alternating via Wilmslow and Macclesfield and send all of them instead out via the Manchester Airport station and then onto Crewe.

Manchester Airport would then be not much more than a 90 minute rail link to London Euston and would be as quick for many people to get into the centre of London as flying via Heathrow or Gatwick.  Plus, you could offer a service that runs every 30 minutes now and that could be every 15 or 20 minutes in 10 years time.

Now that’s what I call a legacy!

So, let’s get going with a couple of ideas that the Victorians would have seen the economic good sense in.  They would be an investment in infrastructure to set up economic activity in the North West for the next 100 years or more.

The small town high street in Britain today is absolutely knackered. It is, in Monty Python terms, “a dead parrot” and only becoming more so with every passing month. There are lots of reasons, but actually it boils down to there being too much retail space chasing too little money.

The money has moved out of town, onto retail parks and onto the internet. The local high street has as much of a future in its current form as a horse and cart did when Henry Ford invented a mass-market motorcar. It needs to move with the times.

If you were a hypothetical new retailer entering the UK market afresh today, you would do it with great sites in 60 or 70 locations and a fabulous website. You certainly wouldn’t do it with 400-500 outlets, as has been the case in the past.

Your local high street suffers from 3 major problems:

1. Landlords simply haven’t moved with the times and still impose inflexible lease terms. The upward only rent review and limited options for lease exit just don’t cut it today. That still makes it all in favour of the landlord and both a massive risk and a burden for the tenant. Rents have to come down dramatically and turnover related rents introduced to give the shopkeeper a chance of making a buck. Lease terms are dramatically more flexible in the USA and that helps to keep more shops occupied. Incidentally, online sales, as a percentage of total retail sales in California this Christmas just past are reported to have exceeded 25%. That tells you which way the market will move in the UK in the next 5-10 years.

2. The biggest obstacle of all to the survival of the local high street is the cost of parking and access to parking. We have to make every car park free for 2-3 hour visitors. The technology is straightforward. You mustn’t clog up the car parks with all day office workers. Free car parking and lots of it is the biggest single reason why people go to out of town shopping centres and retail parks.

3. Inflexible planning restrictions. We need to encourage, by tax and planning policy, much more flexible use of high street space. We need to give permission for more leisure, recreational and non-A1 retail activities quite straightforwardly.

So, what else can you do that is proactive to save the local high street? Well, certainly not the Mary Portas preferred route – one day craft and farmer’s markets. Absolute nonsense! We need to bring people back into the high street all day and every day. 365 days of the year. We need to reinvent what we use the high street for.

We need to get people living back in and near the high street. Give big tax incentives to landlords and developers to create residential accommodation in the town centre areas. First and second floors above lots of shops are currently hardly used. Get them converted to relatively low cost living accommodation and solve more than one problem at once.

Local high streets definitely represent a big residential opportunity.

David E Hughes is a retailer and the author of Dirty Business, a must-have book for aspiring entrepreneurs. If you want to get hold of a copy go to www.dirtybusinessbook.com.

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Busy, busy busy! For those of you who know David, you’ll know he’s always thinking about the next thing to do. He is currently very actively involved in his self storage business – the store room http://www.thestoreroom.co.uk/ and PODS who provide portable moving and storage services http://www.pods.com/uk/. The latest venture is an online customised t-shirt business that prints t-shirts for every occasion http://www.got-the-t-shirt.co.uk/. Check out the sites!