Summertime and the living is easy - at least for Edinburgh’s commercial classes. The Festivals are jumping - heading for two million ticket sales across the 'cultural olympiad'. The warm weather is stuffing the pockets of hoteliers and those Edinburgh folk who famously decamp for the summer in order to charge inflated rents to festival goers. Where else could you see a caravan being offered at £800 a week?
But it’s not just the Festival that’s putting a smile on the faces of Edinburgh’s business class. Somehow, the financial crisis that was supposed to turn the capital city into a soup kitchen for bankers seems to have completely passed it by. Edinburgh house prices rose 20% in the year to February 2010; unemployment at 3.3% is way below the Scottish average. New business start ups are up 33%, planning applications are pouring in, commercial property is recovering. Even the tram chaos seems to be passing, to be replaced by something worse: an endless traffic jam of new Range Rovers and BMW as Edinburgh’s new money pours into the car showrooms. If you’re looking for austerity, you won’t find it here.
But there’s a slightly shifty quality to this prosperity - as if the benefiaries feel just a little guilty about it. One prominent Edinburgh financial commentator has taken to calling Edinburgh “Dodge City”, such has been its ability to side-step the banking collapse, the economic recession and now the government’s austerity drive. The city that was at the centre of the financial cyclone seem to be making a fortune out of it. But the catch is that their good fortune is almost entirely built on other peoples’ taxes.
