However, I have driven past their head offices and seen the huge numbers of very ordinary looking people who work there. I also watch the television and read the newspapers and see the way the retailers constantly fight each other to prove they are offering the lowest prices. On my weekly foray to Tesco, I have the impression that competition is alive and well, at least in Clitheroe.

Now the Office of Fair Trading is trying to tell us this is all a mirage. They have conducted dawn raids on all the biggest consumer products companies and retailers and are trawling through the thousands of e-mails they took away to try to prove a huge swindle has been perpetrated on us and, far from the market being competitive as I thought, it's all one big fix.

At this time of financial difficulty, I can understand why the state would like us to blame the retailers or the manufacturers or both. If we do that, perhaps we will not blame the Government. But are they telling us the truth?

I do not think so. We English, by and large, are a law-abiding lot. Of course, we do break the law, from time to time, when the law is silly. There can be few of us who have driven along an empty motorway, when the driving conditions are perfect, who have not gone faster than 70 miles an hour. It is a perfectly safe thing to do. It gets us home a bit quicker. We just keep an eye out for a police car or speed camera and put our foot down. Aren't we naughty!

On the other hand, we know drink driving is seriously dangerous. If we have had a few too many, we leave our car behind and call a taxi. And, if we see someone seriously drunk getting into his car, we will try to talk him out of it and may even call the police.

The OFT is not inviting us to believe there is the odd rotten apple in our commerce; like a drunk driver who needs to have his licence taken away. It is trying to tell us two things. The first is that the thousands of ordinary English men and women, who staff the head offices of all our major retailers and consumer products companies, are involved in a giant conspiracy to swindle their parents and children, their friends and neighbours, the whole people of England. And the second thing they want us to believe is there is not a single one of these thousands who, from the goodness of his heart or the hope of getting £100,000 from the Sunday papers, was prepared to blow the whistle on the crime of the century. What a load of nonsense!