Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (23 page)

The meeting is being held in the council chamber, a stuffy ground-floor room in the council HQ on North Street, a few metres
north of the town square. It smells, Bryan says later, like the old clothes department in a charity shop. Mike is already
there with a display board and photocopied briefing reports of his presentation. The mayor arrives with the town clerk, Stephen
Fisher, and the meeting gets under way. Norman Campbell looks like a farmer and his hands are tough and workmanlike, but Brian
tells me that he was in oil in Africa, a fact that the Chamber of Commerce seem to hold against him as he's never been involved
in the business of shops and trading. Mike sets out the arguments, which the two men listen to impassively. The traffic, he
says, is hardly a serious problem: the middle of Ilminster isn't the centre of London. Even the most pessimistic (or optimistic,
depending on your point of view) projections only estimate that another twenty­five cars an hour will want to drive through
the middle of town in peak time once the supermarket is open.

'We don't need this huge detour to control the traffic, a detour in which all roads lead to the supermarket but only two of
them to Silver Street.' I can see that Mike is getting annoyed by their apparent lack of interest and he issues a challenge,
saying that, as yet, the townspeople aren't walking down Silver Street carrying placards and protesting. Norman wakes up.
'We don't want any of that,' he says quickly.

'We understand,' Mike goes on, 'that the traffic department looks only at traffic, not at the situation of the town as a whole.'
This also rattles the mayor. Up on the wall, a wooden plaque lists the names of the mayors of Ilminster over the last twenty
years. Each had held the position for only two years, scant time to oversee the arrival of a supermarket. Of the fourteen
members of the council, only five are elected: the rest are co-opted by the existing members as there are not enough people
willing to stand for the posts. Many of the crucial decisions were taken before Norman's time in office, but they are the
decisions that the council seems determined to stand by and I don't feel optimistic that anyone, or anything, is going to
change their mind.

'This plan is going to split the town in two,' Mike says.

'We don't see that,' Norman replies. 'We believe that the supermarket will bring increased numbers of people to the town and
that they will come into the old town after visiting the store. It will help the town, not detract from it.'

Tesco currently takes 30 percent of the country's grocery spend and its sales have gone up by 23 percent in the past two
years. There is no evidence in any study I have seen that a single supermarket has actually boosted the local economy.

Bryan turns to me and asks if I will tell the mayor some of the statistics that the New Economics Foundation has published
in the last few years about the impact of supermarkets on market towns. I rattle off the main findings: £10 spent in a local
shop puts £25 back in the economy, £10 spent in a supermarket puts back only £14. Profits go to head office and are never
ploughed back into the town. All sorts of other businesses, such as key-cutters, small printers and local accountants, pay
the price along with the shopkeepers. Supermarkets can afford to drop prices for as long as it takes to hound out competition.
I add that their financial clout is so huge that anything that can be done to help level the odds needs to be done and, on
that basis alone, the road scheme must be reconsidered.

'We listened and it is right that we listened,' Norman says, after Mike and I have finished. 'But the whole scheme was the
subject of full discussion. As far as everyone is concerned we have the best answer to our main concern - keeping the town
alive - and that needs to be appreciated. Out of courtesy we have listened to your objections and we will give your proposals
some thought. But can we go back on planning? How can we take this idea forward?'

Bryan points out that, for him, the number of people actually visiting his shop is critical. Only one out of every five people
who goes into Lane's actually buys something, and that can be a £1.50 greeting card or a £400 garden bench. 'What will hurt
the town is the slow chipping-away, and it doesn't take much. People are anxious. What would happen if one of the banks decided
to close down? The others would too,' he says.

Norman brings the meeting to an end by saying he has an appointment to meet his wife for a cup of coffee before going to Lane's
to buy a birthday present. 'I'm telling you after the meeting, Bryan,' he adds, 'so you didn't think I was trying to bribe
you.'

I go to visit Colin Rolfe in Chard. He lives in a modern development on the edge of town, in a red-brick corner house. There's
a barbecue outside the front door. Inside, Zoe and her mum are watching
Narnia
on a video she describes as 'dodgy'. On the kitchen table Colin has laid out papers, labels and packets of Tesco's ham. He
talks me through the process. Hygrade buys pigs at 'best price', and if they're not available at the best price in the UK
then they are bought from other EU countries. They're butchered at Beechings in Chard and then, if there's an oversupply,
or if Tesco have suddenly decided they don't need so much ham that month, the pork is sent to Taunton, where it's stored and
frozen at Novacold. It is sent back to Chard either when there is a shortage of meat or when it's over ten months old. Under
law, the pork from the dead pigs has to reach your shopping basket within a year of the animal's demise. It is generally the
case that what we buy in the supermarkets labelled as 'fresh meat' can be anything from thirty-five days to eleven months
old.

Colin explains to me what happens in the factory. Once there, the hams are dunked in vast vats which inflate the meat with
water, at the same time adding salt, dextrose, stabilisers such as diphosphates, triphosphates, and polyphosphates, and the
antioxidants sodium ascorbate and the preservative sodium nitrate. The hams are tumbled around in these vats of chemical solution
for one hour continuously, then for ten minutes on, fifty minutes off, for another twenty-four hours. The minimum time the
meat spends in the stainless steel tumblers is thirty-six hours, the maximum is five days. The resulting hams are cooked to
a temperature of
lO.5°C
for two minutes, then cooled to less than 5 degrees. Then they're bagged up and can be stored for another twenty-eight days.
After that, the hams are taken out of their bags and roasted at 250°C for a minimum of thirty minutes, cooled again, and refrigerated
for up to two days. Colin gives me a copy of the internal flow diagram for pre-sliced ham and I notice that at this point
on the list of what-to-do-and-when, the ham ceases to be described as 'meat' or 'legs' and becomes simply 'product'. The product
is then transferred from the fridge to a spiral slicing machine. The hock bone is removed and a cutter whizzes round in endless
circles, slicing off pieces of what will be sold as 'fresh ham'. The product is then vacuum packed and each pack is inflated
with preservative gases. The check-list notes that 'each pack is inspected for seal integrity'.

'That bit's important,' Colin tells me. 'Once you break the seal, you may have only a couple of days left. When you buy ham,
you think you're buying something fresh; in fact, you're buying something that is right at the very end of its usable life.'

Our talk turns to Hygrade, where the union attempts to increase redundancy payouts have, so far, come to nothing. A £500 relocation
payment has been offered to any workers who need to move house to find new employment, an offer that Colin says would be a
joke, were it not so serious. So far, twenty-two of the workforce of 305 have found new jobs, even though taking the jobs
means they don't qualify for the redundancy of £290 per year of work.

'We're all taking any jobs we can find,' Colin says. 'The food industry is menial and specialised. What can someone who has
worked in Hygrade since they were a teenager, shoving bits of pork into stainless steel drums, actually do? Not much.' Colin's
been offered a job with the union: it won't pay well but he knows he is lucky. He shows me a document that he's got hold of
- 'Don't ask me how!' - which outlines plans for the relocation of the company. It sets out the dates and the stages when
works are to be completed and demonstrates clearly that Tulip's primary concern is not to miss a single day's production.
There are two corporate logos at the top of the page: Tulip on the left-hand corner, Tesco on the right.

Zoe has been out shopping with her mum and her youngest son, Jack. They arrive back with twenty carrier bags which they dump
on the kitchen floor. Astonishingly, they've been to Tesco. Jack has a small plastic bag containing a colouring book and set
of cheap, waxy crayons: Tesco's Easter offering to kids. After the announcement in March that there would be a competition
inquiry into supermarket chains, Anatole Kaletsky, writing in
The Times,
noted that 'anyone who has tried to find anything worth eating in the garish monoculture of a Tesco "convenience store" will
surely pray that some
deus ex machina
will save what is left of the small greengrocers, butchers and delicatessens that Tesco, in particular, seems determined to
eradicate from Britain's high streets'. But, he goes on to say, 'hopes of reining in the big four through regulation are almost
certainly forlorn. Tesco's depredations will not - and from a legal standpoint cannot - be stopped by the Competition Commission
or the Office of Fair Trading. Controlling planning, liberalising parking, banning deliveries by articulated lorries or enforcing
rent controls to support small shops artificially are all measures that might nibble away at the growth of the megastores.
But,' Kaletsky concludes, 'none will work. Only consumer choice has a real hope of cracking the supermarket monoculture. If
people genuinely value local shops they must be prepared to pay higher prices for the goods they sell. They must be prepared
to resist the blandishments of the cut-price retail chains and distinguish between those that offer quality and socially responsible
behaviour, as opposed to merely competing on price.'

When I was editing the
Daily Express
my boss, the Labour peer Clive Hollick, invited Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, to lunch. In the retailing world Leahy is a god,
and I could tell that Clive was hoping that his magic might rub off on the
Daily Express.
At the time we met, in 2000, the
Express
was struggling with its sales, constantly being beaten into second place in the mid-market by the might of the
Daily Mail.
Like the
Mail,
Tesco was just getting bigger, seemingly by the hour. Leahy had taken the helm from his predecessor, the flamboyant Lord McLaurin,
who went on to become the chair of the MCC. He told us that when McLaurin took over, Tesco was playing second fiddle to Sainsbury's.
Thinking about Sainsbury's dominated the thinking of the Tesco executives: if they produced a new product, be it a single
variety of yoghurt or a whole product range, Tesco did so too. If they dropped their prices, Tesco followed suit. McLaurin's
first command was to 'forget Sainsbury's'. He said he didn't want to see the Sains­bury's name on any documents, or hear about
the company in any meetings. From now on, Tesco was going to do its own thing. It worked. When McLaurin retired Leahy took
over a company that was already winning. Leahy's masterstroke was the introduction of the loyalty card: until then, only Green
Shield Stamps had rewarded customers for continued business. Other companies now started copying Tesco.

I remember Leahy as a middling sort of man: middling height, middling looks, unflashy clothing and a quiet turn of phrase.
He was likeable and self-contained. No, he wouldn't do an interview with his brother (who ran a corner store in their home
town of Liverpool); indeed, he wouldn't do an interview at all. His personal life was just that; his politics were private.
Tesco always supported the government of the day, regardless. He'd driven in from his office in Cheshunt, north London, a
journey that takes well over an hour on agood day. Not for Leahy a flash West End office. He works where he lives, where his
customers shop. Every year, he spends two weeks working in one of his stores; he is so anonymous that even his own staff fail
to recognise him. I wondered what he did with all the money he reputedly earns: his home is modest, his kids have been to
state schools, his wife is a GP in the NHS, he drives himself to work in the morning. The first job of his life was as a shelf-stacker
for Tesco and he's never left. My friend Chris Blackhurst, who was then the deputy editor of the
Express
and also a guest at the lunch, later told me that Leahy regards Tesco as his religion. By 2006 it's become a religion that
is taking over the world: they're the fourth largest company in Thailand, the ninth in Hungary. They're in Japan and looking
at China. Leahy told us he was confident that he gave his customers what they wanted, and in 2004 he told Chris that he thought
it 'right to fight the farming and corner-shop lobbies'. Some farmers can't match the quality he demands and corner shops
go out of business anyway. Tesco is the biggest customer of British farming and the creator of over 100,000 jobs.