Sounds like the Tourism Industry in PEI. It costs more and more to buy the bells and whistles needed to keep your "star" rating, driving the little guys out of business or more accurately underground. Which has the effect of making the ratings system pointless.

That is more or less equivalent to what The Beer Store is doing in Ontario, isn't it? Owned by the largest beer companies, it gives their own products preferential product placement, superior access to market data and charges per-store-per-sku stocking fees which disproportionately hits smaller brewers.

Even harsher as this "good housekeeping seal of approval" is what grocery stores in the UK use to stock the shelves. The beer store just makes you pay fees and if you are not MolBattSlee you do not get a return on the payment of those fees.

Does this "Portman Group" have any legal status or are they just bullies?

Capitalists! ...or maybe ologopolists.

Your Free Speech party needs to get on board this one.

We - or rather I - am deeply concerned with any action or inaction which, directly or indirectly, impacts upon beer.

You adopt the platform of the PPPP and I am with you.

I can find nothing in the PPPP platform to disagree with. I am a bit concerned as to this:

"The party soon split into Large Beer and Small Beer factions, despite Rewiński's claims that "beer is neither light nor dark, it is tasty.""

That is more like a Buddhist koan. Beer is all those things collectively and yet also separately.