Politics of Harry Potter middle class, especially whenever Harry confronts his ludicrously dysfunctional and downright abusive adopted family, the Dursleys." The critic Anthony Holden wrote in "The Observer" on his experience of judging "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was very negative—"the Potter saga was essentially patronising, very conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain." A review in "The Guardian" echoed this interpretation and stated that "despite all of the books' gestures to multiculturalism and gender equality, Harry Potter is a conservative; a paternalistic, One-Nation Tory, perhaps, but a Tory
Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series dispute arose between "Harry Potter"'s British publisher, Bloomsbury, and Asda, a British supermarket chain owned by the US corporation Wal-Mart. On 15 July, a week before the release of the final "Harry Potter" novel, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", Asda issued a press release accusing Bloomsbury of unfairly fixing their prices. Asda spokesman Peter Pritchard claimed that Bloomsbury was "holding children to ransom" and that, "[i]t seems like Bloomsbury need to do a quid-ditch as they have sent their prices up north on the Hogwarts Express. By setting the recommended retail price at this level can only be seen