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 first time I have seen the Pride sign in the store after nearly six years shopping there. “Happy Pride Month - 'We're standing with the LGBTQ+ community this June, and all year round,' the sign proclaimed.
I left the store wondering what the former chairman of Morrisons, the late Sir Ken Morrison (1931-2017), would have made of his company’s decision to puff Pride.
In 1993 when I was a reporter on Retail Week, I was approached by PR people acting for Sir Ken. He wanted me to write a profile of him in advance of his decision to float a significant 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 brilliant 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 major northern supermarket chain that was pushing south when I interviewed him. Under his leadership Morrisons had become a public company in 1967.
I shudder to think what he would have made of Morrisons’ capitulation to a political ideology. I believe 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 is, particularly over the transgender issue. He would not have wanted to thrust any political agenda down his customers’ throats.
There is an Aldi next door to the Morecambe Morrisons, which has not yet fallen to Pride. But how long can this family-owned German retailer hold out? Morrisons is now no longer a public company having been taken over by a US private equity group in 2021. So it would seem that it is not just public companies like Tesco and Sainsbury's that covet a place in Stonewall’s top 100 most LGBT-friendly employers and therefore become prone to Pride.
I very much doubt I am the only customer Morrisons will lose. But how long before evangelical Christians and principled gender-critical feminists in particular are entirely alienated from the mainstream UK retail brands which seem to have been captured by neo-Marxist ideology?
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
