Politics has for once asserted itself against the demands of our dreary shopping fascism - or at the least the demands of the big boys.
The Guardian makes excuses for fascist regimes, but wants to call Tesco fascist. No surprise there. But let Ashley continue.
The current rules, which date back to the John Major years, allow small shops to open for as long as they want on Sundays, while restricting stores of more than 3,000 square feet to six hours. It makes Sunday in England (Scotland has more liberal opening hours) feel very slightly different, and it gives small retailers a tiny foothold against big corporate power.

Yet this is battle joined, not a battle won. Go down most high streets and you find they look the same, the same chains and the same window displays. Where there are small, distinctive retailers, they are embattled. My local high street is entirely typical. A tiny number of genuinely independent businesses are hanging on by their fingertips. We still have a good local butcher. But the fruit and veg shop could not survive and the fishmonger closed years ago. Chains of cafes, charity shops and junk-food outlets jostle the last grocery stores. There's a desolate feel to pavements that should be crowded with local people. It seems that the lure of the supermarket and the nearest retail park is just too great. This, we are told, is what "choice" means.

Curious, then, isn't it, that when you ask people they say they want real choice, which means the local and the quirky. When the baker or the little bookshop go, something in the local spirit dies. Even as voters drift away from party politics, they can get very heated and involved in the politics of the high street.

Funny, she did not ask me what "real choice" means. I wonder if she restricted herself to her fellow soirée attendees.

The big stores such as Tesco precisely because of the "lure of the supermarket", that is to say, because buyers want to go there, even if they are not the places that Ashley's crowd likes. Before the supermarket chains Tesco and Aldi opened up in my nearby market town, we had a local seller who offered low quality and poor variety, but compensated for that with high prices. Since Tesco and Lidl entered the market, the local seller has survived by cutting prices, and stocking goods at the higher quality end that Tesco does not, plus it has started serving the local Polish immigrants.

Ashley sneers at choice, as when she writes:

A small restaurant is giving up and KFC wants to move in. It will join the burger bars and pizza chains that always seem to thrive - we must produce enough pizza in a half-mile of south-west London to feed most of southern Italy.
So what? If people do not like pizza, those places will not survive. And if they do, then the pizza places will survive even if everyone at Ashley's latest soirée does not eat icky pizza. Ashley is not really sneering at choice. She is sneering at other people for not making her choices. And she calls other people fascists.