My e-mails end with a signature quote from R. Buckminster Fuller: 'you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.' It's a little absolutist; there are definitely situations where fighting the existing reality is the way to go. But I still think its a very powerful, useful idea.

Why? Here are some situations where building a new model would be a challenging prospect. There's Russia under Putin, where the FSB, successors to the KGB, 'control the Kremlin, the government, the media and large parts of the economy—as well as the military and security forces.' Many ex-Russian states have similar oligarchies. There's Iran's Revolutionary Guard - again a huge conglomeration of international military and economic power under the banner of 'IRGC business enterprises' (and now a designated terrorist group according to the US.) There's, of course, the Mafia in Italy: the piles of rubbish building up in Naples over the summer made clear just how tight their hold is on local services. I'd like to see their local council service tender process. The UK has the occasional little protection racket, but we're not really in the same league.

The matter isn't black and white: Russia and the UK aren't the Devil and a lamb. But suppose all the local shops near where I live got together to devise a strategy for competing directly with the Tesco that's just down the road? There are a lot of these shops: they could wield enormous local economic and social power. Under an association, they could get money to promote themselves, find out what products people like me still go to Tesco for (and I did that just last week!) , work on parking, promote the benefits of local shops (which, it must be said, don't currently include the 'friendly local store owner who knows your name and will lend you money' stereotype of 'Josephine's shop' in Simms' Tescopoly...) and could generally throw their collective economic weight about. Anti-Tesco campaigners could help, doing more than just about spending their money elsewhere.

Tesco has plenty of economic clout, too: it gets to sit on Gordon Brown's Business Council for Britain, help devise the government's 'retail-led regeneration strategy', and can afford to spend £25 million on a Sustainable Consumption Institute at Manchester University. But they're unlikely to kill you if you try and organise yourself to compete. As I say, it's not black and white - there's a continuum between 'Tesco are just a successful shop in a free market' and 'Tesco death squads', but there's a lot to be said for the way we do things here. I think it may be a situation where a new model could be built, perhaps out of the structures of the old local shop model. But I'm becoming less inclined to see Tesco as deserving the 'evil' horns and tail it has on the front of Simm's book.

This could just be because I'm re-aligning after a bout of cognitive dissonance again (I shop there sometimes, therefore it must be OK) but I'm a little doubtful that legislating against large supermarkets would, somewhere down the line, improve the quality and number of local shops, or do a great deal for the social fabric of a place. Supermarkets should be banned from opening 'local' small stores like the Metros and Sainsbury's locals, yes. But the two things that'll most help local social life get off the ground would be driving less and watching less TV. Well, it'd either improve it or people would be more inclined to riot, having nothing better to do of an evening.