The UK’s major supermarkets should be broken up to stop them monopolising the market place, a leading adviser to the Conservative Party said yesterday (26 November).
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Speaking at the launch of public policy think-tank ResPublica in London, Tory guru Philip Blond targeted the ‘big four’ – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons – claiming they had been allowed to become “too big”.
Blond, known as the ‘Red Tory’, said Conservative leader David Cameron, who attended to launch the think-tank, should “create new models” for supermarket businesses because “74% of our food retail market is controlled by the big four”.
Blond added that supermarkets should be banned from “joining forces to drive down prices paid to farmers and other suppliers”.
In particular, when asked if a Tory government should target market-leader Tesco, Blond responded: “Yes”.
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By GlobalData“Supermarkets could operate differently and create local markets,” he told attendees. “I’d like to see a proportion of their business go to local suppliers. In the name of freedom we have produced economic concentration and in a number of areas monopoly dominance or indeed something very much like it.”
He insisted: “A perverse corporatism has produced industries that are too big to fail and consequently they have been made bigger again.”
A spokesperson for ResPublica told just-food: “Things have changed through the last couple of generations from consumers going to individual butchers and bakers to now having the convenience of a supermarket.
“[Blond] has said that 74% of all food sold in the UK goes through one of the four big supermarkets and there is an argument very much along the lines of, there is a bias in the taxation system which is penalising small shops and giving the monopolies – some people call it cartel capitalism – an advantage.”
The spokesperson added that Blond also argued the case for small high-street traders in a question and answer session following his speech.
“Small traders need help and one of the big areas that has penalised them is parking and that [Blond] believes that local authorities need to stop penalising their high street by charging high rates because that puts people off as they then say, well the only place I can park for free is the supermarket car park.”
