Britons Want Swiss to Leave Candy Alone

More than 1,000 people marched on Parliament on Tuesday to protest a $3.9-billion (2.1-billion pound) bid by Swiss food giant Nestle SA to buy Rowntree PLC, makers of some of Britain’s most popular candies.

The marchers came from cities where Rowntree has plants as well as from the company’s headquarters town, York, in northern England, to demand that Trade and Industry Secretary Lord Young refer the matter to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

“Rowntree is one of the few large international companies with its headquarters in the North of England and we don’t want it to go to the land of the cuckoo clocks,” Conal Gregory, a Conservative member of Parliament from York, told the rally.

On Monday, opponents of the takeover, some dressed in costumes resembling the packaging of Rowntree’s best-selling Kit-Kat bar, presented a 13,000-signature petition at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s official residence asking for government intervention.

Thatcher said last week that she would await a report from the regulatory Office of Fair Trading on whether to refer Nestle’s bid to the Monopolies Commission.