by Julian Mann, Christian Today
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.