RIOT police were mobilised in Bristol last week to quell a demonstration which had turned asty in the Stokes Croft district of the city.

Forty officers -– some on horseback, other wielding shields and batons – formed a ring around a building occupied by demonstrators in an attempt to keep back an ugly crowd and restore order. Roads were closed causing traffic disruption for miles around. In spite of the disruption, residents of neighbouring houses came on to the streets chanting: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’

The spectacle of police officers quelling public unrest is a rare sight on the streets of the UK, so what had so ignited the ire of the good burghers of this normally peaceful and law-abiding inner-city community? Did they feel an injustice had been committed by the city council? Was democracy under threat? Or had they discovered a child murderer living in their midst?

The cause of the disturbance was far more mundane. Security guards were attempting to evict demonstrators from a building due for redevelopment; they had been squatting there for six weeks. In vain attempts to remain in situ, the squatters used various methods to prolong their occupation by either superglueing themselves to the fixtures and fittings or encasing limbs in concrete.

What sinister purpose was the building to be used for that led to its occupation and made more than 300 people take to the streets in such a threatening manner? Tesco had been given planning consent to turn it into a supermarket.

However, it was not quite as simple as that. The supermarket giant already has 17 branches in Bristol, including 14 alone in a two-mile radius of the proposed new branch, and the people of Stokes Croft felt so strongly that that they took to the streets. As one resident said to a national newspaper: ‘We don’t want a
supermarket selling rubbish. We want good, healthy food.’

On the same day as the Bristol riot, this esteemed publication ran a front-page story exposing a report commissioned by Economic Development Minister Alan Maclean which suggested sacrificing environmental safeguards to protect the countryside so that a new supermarket could be built in a rural location.

The inhabitants of this little rock can learn a great deal from the residents of Stokes Croft and numerous communities nationwide who have had enough of Tesco and to lesser extent, the other supermarket chains whose proliferation – like a retail version of the invasive Japanese knot weed – has slowly strangled local business and driven small shops to the wall.

The growth of the supermarket sector has delivered cheap food and convenience shopping to the masses, with special offers attractive to those on tight budgets. But cheap supermarket food comes at a price. That is why a bottle of water costs more than a carton of milk in chains like Tesco, and why the diary industry there is in crisis.

In bemoaning the cost of an organic or free-range chicken – which on average costs three to four times more than a standard supermarket bird – consumers should not be criticising farmers who farm livestock with compassion; they should be questioning the market forces that condemn animals to factory farming and all the horrors that such Frankenstein techniques entail.

It doesn’t take scientifically produced reports from the likes of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and pronouncements from the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales to make people realise that out-of-town shopping centres and supermarkets often suck the lifeblood out of village life and market towns that were recorded as retail hubs in the Domesday Book.

Anyone who spends any length of time in the UK will have witnessed this harmful retail shift. I have visited Cornwall every September for the past ten years. In one 12-month period alone two large Tesco stores appeared, as if out of nowhere, within ten miles of each other on the outskirts of Wadebridge and in Padstow. Where there were once green fields stand blots on the landscape.

The people of Wadebridge are now fighting to prevent Sainsbury opening up shop and Morrison’s building a second store – in addition to a recently redeveloped yet long-established town-centre Co-op. And so they should.

Wadebridge is a delightful old town with a fabulous main street boasting an eclectic collection of local stores, including a haberdasher, an ironmonger, two high-quality butchers, a gallery or two and a fine old coaching inn that oozes so much original character that if a highwayman tied his horse up outside and popped in for a pint of fine local ale, no one would bat an eyelid.

There is an alternative to supermarket shopping and Economic Development would be well advised that huge supermarket chains are not a panacea for freedom of retail choice. If local economies are to survive, we must all support a sustainable local food chain and a variety of outlets to deliver the widest possible choice.

It is ironic that the very government department that last year exhorted us to buy local to keep recycling the money generated by economic activity in the Island is now seriously considering letting in yet another retail chain with huge buying power who will parcel up the profits made and send the cash back to corporate headquarters, wherever that may be.

Competition does not necessarily result in better services or greater choice, especially where opening already well-served markets to new operators sounds the death knell for small and local businesses. The transformation of the town centre into a clone of a bog-standard UK high street, which has seen familiar local names replaced by global brands, is warning enough.

Notwithstanding the protestations of local retailers who feel under threat at the prospect of Tesco or whoever setting up shop, the revelation that we are governed by politicians who are prepared to put the interest of big business above the protection of the environment simply to bring down the price of the weekly shop is alarming.

What price a loaf of bread in Jersey? A handful of coins, or a few vergées of precious countryside?