A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Wal-Mart Wins?

Back to my post about Asda coming to town. This is quite depressing. I'm all in favour of competition, but Goliath being given all the knuckledusters is a bit rich!

Our philandering Deputy Prime Minister said this "I know that the big retailers can put pressure on local stores, and we have to be aware of this, but which is worse: the major retailers leaving the towns completely or having the big retailers trading downtown, bringing in more money and more people into the town centre as a whole."

And this from a campaigner in Dorset "These guys are professionals and are in for the long haul. They have plenty of experience from around the country in winning planning permission – from PR campaigns in the local press to planning experts and expensive lawyers. What can we, a bunch of amateurs, do to stop them?"

I'm not against fair competition or even bit of knocking copy in promotions, but lying, cheating, and spivving your way to building a massive store to crack the nuts of your competition is not my type of free enterprise!

This article says "At its heart, New Labour embraces neo-liberalism, an ideology that sees planning legislation as anti-competitive, in that it stops companies from doing what they want to do and adds costs. This is the reason why new planning policy is a slimmed down and faster procedure. There are also good macro economic reasons for the government not to break the power of the supermarkets – the competition between Tesco and Asda keeps prices and hence inflation down. This may be good for economic stability, but at what cost!"

No wonder so many sleazy cash merchants are playing "Tennis with Tony". It takes a spiv to know a spiv!!

1 comments:

I am all for free competition but Wal-Mart always constructs the ugliest looking buildings around. They should be forced to create more architecturally pleasing buildings in more transit friendly locations.

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