By Rural Affairs Editor Nathan Rous

I cannot be the only person who gets a crushing sense of deja vu whenever I walk into a supermarket; the sort of depressing, take-the-wind-out-of-your-sails moment which pre-empts your transition from sane human with a grasp of your faculties to consumerist zombie who shuffles up and down the aisles staring past the neat rows of teeth-rotting cereals, E-numbers, and hydrogenated fats.

If you stripped the bleak warehouse (the novel Dickens really wanted to write) back to its factory fittings and rid it of the garish branding which each supermarket sickeningly adheres to, you wouldn’t have a clue where you were.

The limp chicken strips, blown off a carcass by a moron wielding an air hose, would still lie firmly in their plastic coffins; the fresh-baked bread using industrial strength yeast and swimming pool additives would still go hard the day after you brought it home; and the in-house magazines would still contain the same variety of mind-numbing recipes designed to inspire the housewife who’s busy enough holding down a full-time job without the hassle of feeding the family.

With this in mind, the Competition Commission’s inexplicable findings – that we need not fewer but more supermarkets to give us more choice – mean that the tiresome weekly shop will become ridiculously one-sided.

The report suggests that competition between the major retailers is important for a progressive society. But is the British consumer really bothered about whether to choose bread from Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Morrisons?

By giving us more faceless supermarket experiences we simply have a greater lack of choice. None of the big boys are doing anything different from each other, they are simply scooping up every product possible to put their neighbours out of business.

Not only this, but our food heroes, the army of men and women who strike out alone in search of an ethical product that scores as high on welfare as it does on taste, may as well tighten the noose around their own necks such is the lack of protection for their industry.

The Competition Commission dismissed their plight with the arrogance of a Victorian schoolmaster, saying that Tesco’s monstrous 31 per cent of the market was not such a dominant position after all.

Try telling that to the stock market, which reacted to this report by watching Tesco’s shares rise to an all-time high on the back of it. The company is now worth an extra £1.2 billion as a result – money our independent producers can only dream of.

No one is prepared to admit that the supermarkets can strong-arm their way out of any political storm smelling of roses (ones they’ve bought from Kenya no doubt).

The Competition Commission was set up to protect the small and the weak, and enable them to stand tall against the giants and perform that old David knockout trick. What the commission has simply succeeded in doing is arm the bully with an even greater arsenal of weapons with which to strike out.

And there you were thinking they were raising the price of milk by a fraction to help our farmers out.

Every little helps, eh? Who are you trying to kid?