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. Of course there is demand; you would get people shopping for the duration on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday given the chance.The Government has invested in the notion of measuring national happiness; it has yet to prove that extended consumer opportunities add to it. We can already shop online on a Sunday; do we have to be able to do it in person too?
Yet the grim assumption underlying liberalisation of the British trading laws is that the consumer imperative is the overriding one, that the individual’s need to shop, to consume, is more important than any larger needs on the part of the community. And those needs are harder to define: a communal breathing space, a time when we can be assumed to be less busy than on other days, a fixed day of the week when families can, by and large, get together. But that is to assume that we are something larger than the sum of our individual desires for consumption and I’m not sure that the Chancellor actually believes it. A libertarian, such as himself, may argue that shopworkers are free to work or not work on Sunday according to their individual needs and that people are free to shop or not shop according to their conscience. In practice, the availability of 24/7 trading changes everything for everyone. Sunday, when it ceases to be a legally-protected day of rest, can only be sustained as one with a real effort to ride against the culture. And anyone who has tried to ensure that their family does not take advantage of the existing, restricted Sunday trading knows how impossible that is.
The existing Sunday trading law is based on a fiction, a lie. Usdaw, the shopworkers’ union, (and with it, many Labour MPs) was induced to accept the compromise 1994 Act on the basis that working on a Sunday would be strictly voluntary. Anyone who has asked workers in a department store or supermarket how their shifts are organised knows that this is a nonsense. You are employed in the first place after agreeing to work on a Sunday; if you wanted to enforce your right in conscience not to work on a Sunday you would be obliged to go to the trouble and expense of going to law. That’ll make you popular and employable, no? And indeed it was obvious at the outset that the conscience clause in the legislation would be nullified by the commercial imperative. Which leaves us with the bleak prospect that Sunday as a day of rest may be a luxury affordable by the chief executive of Tesco, who, no doubt, values his family time, but not by the people working on his tills.
There’s an interesting parallel here with the marriage laws. The proposal to extend marriage to gay couples may in theory be a matter for those involved but in practice it would change marriage for everyone. The underlying concept of the thing is changed, and it is impossible to enter into that contract pretending it is just as it was before.
David Cameron once sensibly observed that there is such a thing as society and it is not the same thing as the state. But without the framework and sanctions of the state it is difficult for institutions to function, including the institution of Sunday as a day of (relative) rest. To have a collective day of rest means asserting that the community has a particular identity, a shared culture, whose interests justify impinging on the rights of the individual and the operations of the market. And in Britain that culture was and to some extent is, broadly Christian, which means that Jews and Muslims participate in a day of rest other than their own. Yet France, too, restricts Sunday trading without prejudicing its secularism. But the very notion of restricting trading and business on a day common to us all is premised on the idea of society, something with its own needs and traditions, and its own instinct to protect the interests of the family.
It is becoming harder and harder to argue for that idea of society under a Tory-led government. Does the Chancellor actually understand Conservatism as something social and moral and communal as well as an economic project? I doubt it myself.
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