not 'the white stuff'

Adam Smith famously stated in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

A group of dairy processors and retailers have just been found guilty of exactly that and fined a total of £116m. Good, perhaps it should have been more pour encourager les autres. A free market economy is the best way so far discovered of distributing resources, but cartels and monopolies are by their nature insulated from the free market and able to set prices that are overall worse for everybody than they could be. This is overall a bad thing no matter if they give excuses that they are just doing it to protect the downtrodden, as has been claimed by all those involved in this case such as Sainsbury's and Wiseman Dairies:

Sainsbury's, which has agreed to pay £26m, said its price initiatives in 2002 and 2003 "were designed to help British dairy farmers at a time of considerable economic pressure and public debate about whether farmers were getting a fair price for their products".

...

Wiseman Dairies, which faces a £6.1m bill, said that "every penny of additional revenues paid to Wiseman was passed directly to our suppliers".

and Dairy Crest, who helped the competition commission and therefore escaped a fine, which has a press release in which they state:

The milk price initiatives in 2002 and 2003 were aimed at supporting farmers through this difficult period by returning higher prices to them for their milk. The implementation of these initiatives was very well publicised at the time and received widespread support including strong political backing.

The period when this price fixing happened was a very bad time for farming which had just had the Foot and Mouth Crisis (the first one). At the time supermarkets where under preasure in terms of public relations and politics to try and do more for their suppliers, for example in 2003:

Mr Blair said: "I think we need to sit down with the industry and really work out what is the basis on which we want sustainable farming for the long-term.

"And in a sense, what price are we all prepared to pay for that as well."

It would appear that according to them some firms went and took him at his word and attempted to form a cartel to do just this, to the detrement of all their customers. Which brings me back to Adam Smith, as when you expand on the quote from Wealth of Nations you find this:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.