Sir – In the Middle Ages, the citizens of Oxford objected very strongly to their markets being controlled by the University and not by their own elected officials.
We are now moving into a situation in which spaces where we live and shop daily come under the arbitrary control of unelected managers and their security men, exercising policies in which we have no say whatsoever. One local supermarket has decided that it will not sell cooking oil to an individual if they believe he is going to use it to run his van.
An acquaintance of mine with little money at his disposal makes a habit of buying reduced items, but he has been interviewed by the security man and the manager of a different Oxford supermarket and told that he has been watched and seen only to buy reduced items, which is not “allowed”. Both these customers are no longer “welcome”, they are told. That is the “policy”. There is no trial, no appeal.
Elsewhere, supermarkets and whole shopping centres forbid the normal taking of photographs, even of customers’ own children. Why? Policy.
Not content with running the economies of large areas of the Third World, these people want to run our daily lives. This is not their job. They should concentrate on keeping shopping centres clean and pleasant and being grocers.
Roger Moreton, Oxford
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