It was a poignant experience seeing an LGBTQ+ Pride sign on my way out of the Morrisons supermarket in Morecambe after my Saturday morning shop.
This is the primary time I actually have seen the Pride register the shop after nearly six years shopping there. “Happy Pride Month – ‘We’re standing with the LGBTQ+ community this June, and all 12 months round,’ the sign proclaimed.
I left the shop wondering what the previous chairman of Morrisons, the late Sir Ken Morrison (1931-2017), would have manufactured from his company’s decision to puff Pride.
In 1993 once I was a reporter on Retail Week, I used to be approached by PR people acting for Sir Ken. He wanted me to jot down a profile of him prematurely of his decision to drift a major proportion of his family-owned shares on the Stock Market. He was greatly of interest to the paper’s readers so the profile went ahead. Sir Ken rarely gave newspaper interviews.
He was a superb retailer. After he took over the running of the business in 1952, he transformed the family-owned grocer, founded by his father William Morrison in 1899, from a cluster of market stalls in Bradford to a serious northern supermarket chain that was pushing south once I interviewed him. Under his leadership Morrisons had turn out to be a public company in 1967.
I shudder to think what he would have manufactured from Morrisons’ capitulation to a political ideology. I feel he would have ordered the signs to be taken down in every store not because he was ‘homophobic’ in neo-Marxist parlance but because he knew Pride would have been bad for business. He would have understood what a deeply divisive dogma it’s, particularly over the transgender issue. He wouldn’t have desired to thrust any political agenda down his customers’ throats.
There is an Aldi round the corner to the Morecambe Morrisons, which has not yet fallen to Pride. But how long can this family-owned German retailer hold out? Or is it public firms like Tesco and Sainsbury’s and now Morrisons that are especially liable to Pride because they covet a spot in Stonewall’s top 100 most LGBT-friendly employers?
I very much doubt I’m the one customer Morrisons will lose. But how long before evangelical Christians and principled gender-critical feminists particularly are entirely alienated from the mainstream UK retail brands which appear to have been captured by neo-Marxist ideology?
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
