It is difficult to design an undergraduate course comprising only a quarter of a year’s work on competition policy in the United Kingdom and EEC, and equally hard to write a short book that will cover the ground accurately and lucidly and also raise the policy issues with which the enforcement authorities in the U.K. and Brussels are faced. There are too many layers of control in the U.K.: the Restrictive Trade Practices legislation is formalistically conceived, extraordinarily complex, and catches all sorts of commercial transactions that were never envisaged. Some have had to be removed from the scope of the legislation by subsequent legislation, and the Restrictive Practices Court managed in Ravenseft to let out restrictive covenants on land. Unfortunately, since the statute is not expressly based on anti-competitive criteria but on formalistic definitions, the court did not let out only restrictive covenants intended to protect the amenity of a neighbourhood, but also many others that may, indeed, be anti-competitive.

It took the reviewer 50 pages, larger than those in Merkins and Williams, briefly to analyse the law as to what agreements are caught by the restrictive trade practices legislation. Merkin and Williams have, very sensibly, not attempted to analyse the provisions fully. It cannot be done accurately in the space they have devoted to the subject. Nevertheless, they have gone through many of the provisions relating to the scope of the control in the first substantive chapter dealing with horizontal agreements. In the same chapter, they also analyse the EEC competition law and the case law, applying to various kinds of restriction. In my view, this makes the chapter unduly complex and difficult for a beginner, even a very bright beginner, to follow. There is much to be said for an integrated approach to the particular types of transaction being analysed, but the structure of the U.K. and EEC law are too different conveniently to be explained together. I would prefer to see, after the historical introduction, a short analysis of the legal provisions of both systems with cross references. That would enable the authors to deal not only with the general part of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act which relates to horizontal agreements, but also with some of the exceptions for vertical agreements.

In the chapter on horizontal agreements I would have liked to see more about the conclusions of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) on cartels from the reports it produced on goods in the 1950s and services thereafter. It condemned horizontal cartels in strong terms; for instance in Fire Insurance (1972) it said: