LETTER : Labour will lose support if it sides with the supermarkets

Francesca Weal points out (Letters, 28 April) that her village shops can supply such things as excellent venison, organic wholemeal bread, quiches with a real home-made taste, and pork trotters. These, she implies, are valuable to shoppers without access to a car. But many people without a car wouldn't buy any of those things.

Country-dwellers go to out-of-town supermarkets to buy necessities at city prices, because their local shops are closed during lunch breaks and when they come home from work, and are unlikely to have all they need.

Ms Weal rightly points out that the cost of having a small-town or village shop, as against an out-of-town site, is prohibitive. This is the reason why surviving village shops are the pretty ones selling non-essentials at high prices. We small-city dwellers have the same problems, and here in Bath it is easier to buy a glass fish than a hammer to smash it with.

Nicholas du Quesne Bird

Bath, Avon