Today on World At One following on from the news of the sale of House of Fraser to Mike Ashley, Kevin Hollinrake, the MP for Thirsk and Malton was invited to speak to Jonny Dymond about how retail businesses were being destroyed by online traders. Although the discussion for obvious reasons was focused on retail outlets, in fact the discussion could easily have been extended to consider the online demolition of SMEs by businesses such as Amazon which goes far beyond only retail issues. Many of the small and medium size business, let alone the micro enterprises across our nation that together are employing far more people than the largest businesses or even organisations such as the NHS, are under deep threat from the likes of Amazon. One of the best ways in which people like Kevin Hollinrake can help challenge this threat is by calling on the Government and local authorities to ensure that public sector procurement focuses on SMEs and entirely avoids the use of exclusively online suppliers. In particular as a Yorkshire MP he must call on all Yorkshire based Local Authorities to reverse their decision recently announced for them to treat Amazon as their one stop supplier.

Postscript: Today (Saturday) I messaged Kevin about this matter and his tweet response was as follows:

It seems reasonable to ask other Yorkshire MPs to join Kevin’s vital campaign while at the same time asking him to check out the story in the business pages of the Telegraph from two weeks ago, a paper one imagines he would read!