Paige Alexander, 27, owns Lacy’s Boutique in Basildon where trade can be unpredictable.<\/p>\n
“Some days are good; some days are bad,” she says.<\/p>\n
“We do a lot of online selling, so that’s where most of our clientele is based… the footfall, that’s quite bad, but other than that it’s going OK.”<\/p>\n
In the run up to the election, she found local councillors were “more about point scoring than actually focusing on the problems at hand”.<\/p>\n
Although she did not vote in the Basildon election because she lives outside the area, she said she was “glad” Reform performed well and hopes it leads to change.<\/p>\n
She explains: “It’s just because it’s something different \u2014 what can they offer us in terms of what we haven’t had before?<\/p>\n
“Labour as it stands wasn’t going to do much for us as businesses. We are hopeful that Reform will change that.<\/p>\n
“Britain is in dire need of change and I don’t think Keir Starmer is the person for the job… I don’t think that a small town like Basildon is the top of his priorities. <\/p>\n
“I feel like he’s got other priorities that are more important than family-run businesses.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paige Alexander, 27, owns Lacy’s Boutique in Basildon where trade can be unpredictable. “Some days are good; some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-579500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}