Liberty Alone

Recently the results of a review into price fixing by the supermarkets was released. The anti-supermarket brigade celebrated, now they could point to how the evil supermarkets were raising prices! (whilst ignoring recommendations that the planning process should be relaxed to allow more supermarkets and greater competition…).

Except, what the supermarkets claim they were doing was reacting to consumer demand for British farmers to be given higher prices. So, in the way most anti-supermarket types tend to approve of elsewhere, they added a premium to try and raise prices at the farm gate, in other words, they unilaterally adopted so called fair trade.

Of course, the difference is that they didn’t offer an alternative, but why should they? After all, most Fair Trade types want it to become compulsory anyway, they’re always going on about making ‘Councils Fair Trade’ and similar initiatives.

So what are supermarkets to do? They were wrong to collude, but now farm campaigners (often the same people as the critics) will start saying how evil supermarkets are for charging low prices…

It reminds me of a joke:
In Soviet Russia three men were in prison, for not supporting the revolution. They asked each other why they were in prison:
The first was there because he was late to work so wasn’t pulling his weight to support the revolution.
The second was there because he was early to work - so he was guilty of trying to gain advantage over his comrades and therefore undermine the revolution.
The third was in prison for always being on time to work. The others looked astonished. That was until the explanation was given - being on time meant he must be undermining the revolution by having a western watch.

Supermarkets are in the same position. Charge too much they’re gouging the consumer, charge to little, they’re gouging the producer, charging the ‘right’ amount just isn’t possible…

An excellent article, at of all places, The Grauniad.

Choice quoatations:

In 1919, after serving with the RAF during the first world war, 21-year-old Jack Cohen invested his £30 demob money in surplus food stocks and a stall in the East End of London. … The idea that Tesco has always been a corner-shop-crushing colossus is a lie, one perpetuated by bitter, third-rate businessmen who would dearly love to have achieved a quarter of what Cohen did but lacked the ability and luck to pull it off, and who now seek to clothe their envy and hypocrisy in the rhetoric of care for the community.

And let me please declare that I, for one, wasn’t put on this earth to make life easy for British farmers … The EU has done enough to feather their nests; I don’t need to add to their nest eggs when I go shopping.

Whenever I hear the word “family” used as a moral absolute, I immediately reach for my amyl nitrate and my whistle. Families are only as good or as bad as the individual family in question; seeing the word used as shorthand for all that is good and pure is ridiculous.

I have no fear of the modern world, a fear that runs like mad mercury through those who celebrate small shops. But it is the modern world which has given so many of us the right to follow our hearts, live our dreams and hold fast to our freedom.

We should be celebrating the wonderful diversity that the supermarkets offer us. We can eat fruit at any time of the year (whilst increasing the incomes of people across the world). I can get good quality beef for a reasonable price - something previous generations could only dream of. Guinea fowl, pheasent, poussin and other delicacies are available, prepared with cooking instructions at low prices. This surely lowers the barrier to eating a wider range of food for the slightly adventurous person lacking in confidence.