OFT offers to meet CAMRA and Mulholland

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/news.ma/ViewArticle?R=84983

This is very tedious. Your diatribes about the lofty position OFT holds miss the point completely as do OFT when it comes to assessing the retail beer market. You simply do not understand what the tie has done to the pub market because you are outside it. It is incomprehensible to anyone outside the market that there is no effective competition in this market - BECAUSE of the tie. Retail prices for beer are higher to the consumer across the entire market than thye would be without the tie simply BECAUSE of the existence of the tie and its abuse in implementation by pubcos. No more no less.

OFT and those like you keep on missing the point and keep letting pubcos off the hook for their dreadful non performance as 'pub operators'. Pubcos are, as other posters like to describe them 'a cancer on the side of the pub industry' sucking resources out of the vertical arrangement with no positive input. If pubcos were simply cut out and cauterised from the supply chain the pub industry would with time become healthy again and retail prices would eventually stabilise at a lower level than they stand now - the consumer, and ALL other actors in the pub sector, would come out better off.