As you say, not very Conservative but I don’t think it’s a bad idea necessarily at all. I honestly doubt it’ll happen.
There’s a narrative building that retailers and suppliers are exploiting inflation for greed but it’s simply not true. Tesco etc. make single-digit margins overall and choose to make a loss on various food items and a reasonably large margin on others.
Suppliers typically make bigger margins than that but even with the cost increases they’re putting through which aren’t entirely passed on to consumers they aren’t making the margins they did even a few years ago. They’ve been squeezed for a long time by the retailers who contrary to popular belief have tried to give consumers the best price possible and undercut each other plus obviously being squeezed in recent years by energy prices, salaries etc.
In the short term though it might net out to be a good thing. Longer term it will squeeze smaller suppliers out and we’ll have less choice of brands from a few multinationals. Longer term than that you probably lose say a Morrisons and Aldi maybe fills that void but then longer term than that you move towards monopolies which risk much higher prices for us.
I don’t mind it being explored though if we have bright enough people in charge to explore it. At the moment I get the feeling it’s the government shooting from the hip.
