Sundays should be about more than just economics

The Chancellor didn’t even bother to hide the thick end of the wedge as he inserted the thin end into the Sunday trading laws. He declared yesterday that restrictions on Sunday trading would be lifted for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics on the basis that ‘It would be a great shame if the country had a “closed for business” sign on it.’ And he went on to remark, ‘maybe we will learn some lessons from it’. What might those be, do you suppose? That people, left to themselves, will shop all day, every day and should therefore be able to? Certainly that was the conclusion of The Times, which observed in its leader (£) today, that ‘Britain, like most nations, is becoming a 24-hour, seven-day society, and is the livelier for it…. Britain is a nation of shopkeepers. Let them open their doors.’

I’d dispute, myself, that Britain is all the livelier to the extent that you can hang around Tesco for six hours on Sunday, or that it will become livelier still if we can do it for 12 or 24.