Complaining about Tesco’s outsourcing of its suppliers, architects and surveyors reminds me of the poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, First They Came, in which he tells how he failed to speak up when the Nazis took away communists, then trade unionists, and then Jews because he was none of those, and that when they finally came for him there was nobody left to speak up

After a decade of manual and skilled blue collar workers being thrown on the scrapheap because of outsourcing, leaving us in the position where Britain now has little or no industry of its own and thus no means with which to pay its way in the world, now it’s the turn of the professional middle classes to be made unemployed. But because most of us failed to oppose this (though that doesn’t include me), it is too late to make a stand now that we are being affected. Thus calls for boycotts against Tesco are useless. It has been allowed to become too powerful and now there is nobody left to speak up for us.

If you vote for the LibLab&Con party in the forthcoming election, outsourcing, job losses and low pay will continue unabated.

Peter Phillips

Postscript

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