THE CLOBBERED consumers in so-called "rip-off Britain," where the prices of so many goods and services have for decades been disproportionately higher than those in other countries, may mark this week as the one when their exploitation was at last eclipsed.

For the coincidental coming together today of government plans to end price-rigging trading practices, with massive fines for firms that offend, and a supermarket price war triggered by Asda's new owners, aggressive US giant Wal-Mart, should give UK shoppers the benefit they have lacked for too long - that of real competition.

Yet, it is not as if consumers in Britain have been blissfully unaware of the disadvantage they have been under all these years.

Anyone who has travelled abroad or take the slightest notice of consumer affairs will have observed the glaring difference and dearness of prices here compared to those in Europe and America.

Cars cost us thousands of pounds more, clothing and electrical goods in America cost its consumers only the same in dollars as we pay in pounds for them and our supermarket chains' profits are treble those of their continental counterparts. Recent probes by the Office of Fair Trading - into the pricing of Volvo cars and football clubs' replica strips - have exposed the rip-off system that British buyers have suffered for so long.

Now, quite rightly, the measures unveiled today in the new Competition Act threaten firms which keep prices artificially high with fines that could run into millions of pounds.

But equally refreshing is the stiff gust of competition that famous price-slasher Wal-Mart is sending across the Atlantic into Britain's high-price supermarkets.

They have axed £30 million from Asda prices as 100 top brands are reduced by up to 15 per cent - and rivals Tesco, Sainsbury and Safeway have been forced into a fierce fight for custom.

At last, we glimpse the dawn of a marketplace ruled by the spender, not the seller.

But welcome as are both the departures that today promise us this, is not the 1999 "sell-by" date on them years and years overdue?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.