The Spectator

Barometer | 23 April 2011

This week's Barometer

issue 23 April 2011

Easter day


The late date of Easter this year has rekindled one of Britain’s lengthiest political debates: the implementation, or rather non-implementation, of the Easter Act 1928. The act was to fix the date of Easter on the Sunday following the second Saturday in April — meaning that it would wander between 9 and 15 April rather than between 22 March and 25 April.

— The act demanded that before it could be implemented ‘regard shall be had to any opinion officially expressed’ by a Christian church. That has been the stumbling block. In 1966 the Church Assembly of the Church of England passed a motion in favour. The Catholic Church in Britain also approved. But the Orthodox Church, which has a different date for Easter as it is, did not.

— Greg Knight, Conservative MP for East Yorkshire, has brought up the subject twice in recent years, eliciting an identical prepared response from the government: there are no plans to implement the Act.

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