A preamble to Appendix four, written by a senior MAFF official in the 1920s, confirms that both retailers and shoppers alike lacked any recourse to protection from fraudulent traders and wholesalers. The document was drafted as a government response to the recommendations of the Linlithgow committee. The ministry takes every opportunity to declare that it is powerless to tackle commercial abuses such as underpaying market gardeners for their fresh produce. The Linlithgow findings are filled with talk of malpractices on a huge scale, but somehow MAFF argues that this cannot be tackled head-on because very few cases would be brought. It sounds and reads like the food industry debate to set up the Grocery code 20 years ago.
While we are on the topic, I will add some posts about French parliamentarians Jean-Paul Charié and Michel Raison, in the context of an investigation carried out for the French parliament in the 1990s
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