Asda opens up a new front in city's supermarket wars

FOR reasons I won’t bore you with, I've needed something to smile about lately. And the news that Asda is piling into Salisbury’s supermarket scrum was it.
For if anything might shake Sainsbury’s determination to build what one wag recently called an ‘ark’ on our water meadows, this could be it.
I really admire the public-spirited teenager Hamish Mundell, who, aided by councillor Richard Clewer, has got off his backside and started co-ordinating opposition to the Sainsbury scheme, while most of us simply grumbled about it.
And I do urge everyone who cares about our city’s environment to log on to www.change.org, type the words Sainsbury Salisbury into the search box, and sign up to the pair’s petition.
But actually, I suspect that Sainsbury’s bosses are likely to find the arrival of another fearsome competitor more of a deterrent, if Asda can get its act together quickly. After all, Salisbury surely can’t support more than one extra superstore? Can it?
Asda, foiled by Tesco when it tried to open in Amesbury, says it’s looking at a range of site options, among them one off the London Road, close to the Bishopdown Farm and Hampton Park estates. This seems quite a popular choice, and would have the huge advantage of not dragging further traffic into the jam-on-wheels that is Southampton Road.
Not quite sure how a constant stream of humungous delivery lorries would cope with the railway bridge, though.
But then I’m not saying that it necessarily asda be Asda (oh, those excruciatingly coy, bottom-tapping TV ads!) in that location. It could be Morrison’s at the Old Manor, or Sainsbury’s somewhere else - just about anyone, anywhere (except another Tesco) but please, please, please, not Southampton Road.



ANOTHER, infinitely more weary smile crossed my face on reading that Wiltshire Council is considering ‘video streaming’ its meetings, so that serfs all over its far-flung fiefdom can follow every word issuing from their leaders’ mouths in real time.
If there’s anything more guaranteed to sap your spirit and destroy your faith in our democracy than sitting through a Wiltshire Council meeting, especially a budget meeting, then I have yet to experience it.
I tell you, at their baying, tribal, self-important, long-winded best (naming no names), some councillors make Prime Minister’s Question Time look positively grown-up.