Any colour you like as long as it’s white
Town & Country Planning, November 2005
Party conference fringe meetings are fascinating experiences, and for the speakers they are almost the only taste one ever gets these days – except at election time – of good old public meetings.
They are more polite, of course, but you still have to think on your feet.
And so it was that, in the strange forgotten world of the Winter Gardens in Blackpool during the Conservative Party conference in September, I was bowled rather a challenging question by a gentleman from Belper.
We were discussing the detrimental effect of big retail chains on local economies, and he asked about choice. “I get lots of choice in my supermarket,” he said. “I get organic milk, and whole milk, and skimmed milk and breakfast milk…”
That’s the thing about milk. You can have any colour you like, as long as it’s white.
Still, he is right. Supermarkets have got where they are by providing a kind of choice, and his question puzzled me rather.
But I realised, thinking about it afterwards, how the word ‘choice’ has become a kind of excuse for the centralisation of power in a whole range of areas. The NHS must be micro-managed from the centre because that’s the only way of providing patients with ‘choice’. Supermarkets must be massive in order to provide customers with ‘choice’.
Except that, in both these cases, the kind of choice that we are offered is of a very narrow kind.
If you want some kind of relationship with your doctor – if you go into hospital and want to see the same medical staff twice – or if you want good impartial advice from a GP who knows you, those things are just not on the menu.
Similarly, you have to ask who decides to stock all those different kinds of milk? Well, not me, for starters. Actually, it’s an increasingly narrow coterie of purchasing executives, sometimes based in other countries entirely.
The trouble with centralised monopolies is that you can’t pop in and ask if there’s any chance of them stocking local honey. Or if you want apples that were grown nearer home than regions undiscovered when Columbus was a boy.
“Sorry, there’s no call for it,” say the local staff there, who actually have no idea. You can lobby the board members, just like lobbying Whitehall, to stock your local apples, but then that isn’t exactly choice.
The trouble is that we have an Office of Fair Trading that is supine in the face of this kind of centralised monopoly. They accept that the definition of ‘monopoly’ is anything over an eight per cent share of a market – and then allow Tesco to amass more than a third.
Similarly, Waterstones now has a stranglehold on book retailing in the UK, and the proof is the extraordinary power of their chief buyer Scott Pack. He only has to muse in public that maybe history books are not as popular recently, and publishers stop commissioning them overnight.
He is, in fact, never wrong. He has the market power to enforce his whims.
Waterstones now has a 22 per cent share of the book trade – or 40 per cent in Scotland – and cite competition from supermarkets again as their excuse for Swallowing up the rival Ottakar’s chain.
So when choice is provided by semi-monopolies, revealed as such because of the enormous power of their chief buyers to decide the choice that will be set before us, then really that isn’t any kind of choice at all.
But then, in the midst of this debate in an upper room in Blackpool, and after the gentleman from Belper had left, there was suddenly the revelation that something is shifting again in a more local direction.
The relatively new Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight revealed that their unitary authority have turned down a planning application for a bigger trailer park next to the Isle of Wight ferry terminal.
The park was needed to facilitate the trucking of centralised foodstuffs onto the island, the choice of the small coterie of chief buyers I was mentioning above.
Why did they turn it down? Because they wanted to discourage greater imports and encourage the indigenous productive capacity of the island to provide local, healthy food.
And when Conservative-run local authorities start thinking like this, you can’t help feeling that change is in the air.
