Time to start buying British

I never knew anyone who worked at the HP factory at Aston but there was something very personal about HP sauce. It was part of my childhood and when I first came to Birmingham in the early 70s and I passed the factory regularly, you could smell it long before you saw it, it became an old friend.

There was lots of jumping up and down when Heinz shipped what was quintessentially a British sauce, let's be honest a Birmingham sauce, off to Europe to save a few bob here and there but that seems to be as far as it got.

Look on the bottles and you will find these days it is made in Holland or Spain, both nations renowned for their brown sauce traditions yet people still buy it. No one in Britain seems to want to be British any more, no one wants to stand up for our freedoms, our rights, traditions or culture. We let our politicians lie, deceive, cheat and fiddle with hardly a murmur. The graft and corruption in Whitehall and Town Halls these days would rival anything a third world dictatorship could manage yet no one bats an eyelid.

As long as Big Brother is on telly, full of people any sane person would avoid like the plague in real life, celebrity whatever is on at prime time and Simon Cowell's Karaoke factor is gearing up for summer people are happy.

Back at the brown sauce though. If Pernod-Ricard, for example, were taken over by Coors and decided to move Pernod production to Ireland or wherever there would be riots on the streets, lorries importing the stuff would be overturned and burned, the factory blockaded and the French would refuse to buy the stuff. The French may be many things but apathetic when it comes to France and French is not one of them

Here though, HP sauce, knocked up in Spain with a label implying Britishness, sells as if nothing has happened.

The reason I mention this is that Sainsbury's has stopped selling Branston's tomato sauce and is about to stop selling Branston's Brown Sauce which gives customers a choice of own brand or Dutch and Spanish imports.

Branston's are British with British jobs paying British tax yet a supermarket chain is showing its green credentials by shipping in sauce from La Landa in northern Spain and Elst in Holland in preference to a British product from Suffolk .

The rest of Britain and Birmingham might not care but my boycott of HP and Heinz goes on as does my general policy of buying British whenever I can.