RICHARD C 0 C KETT

A nation of shop-keepers buys Sunday from the Lord
SO, ITS OFFICIAL. We are, after all, a nation of shopkeepers. The House of Commons finally laid any doubts on this matter to rest last week by effectively legalising Sunday shopping, and with it removing all but the last legal restrictions on how we should, or should not, spend our Sundays.
This also ends one of the most ferocious behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns of modern Parliamentary history. An ex Daily Mirror journalist and leading light of the successful Shopping Hours Reform Council admitted on Radio 4 last Saturday that his pressure-group had spent over £900,000 in distributing literature and wining and dining every single MP.
This was the money of the big battalions, the Sainsburys and the Tescos, but by all accounts the defeated Keep Sunday Special lobby conducted an equally vigorous rearguard action to protect our virtue from the temptations of parting with our money on Sunday.
If we are to believe the serried ranks of Bishops, ex-Bishops, aspiring Bishops and Chief Rabbis wheeled out to deplore the demise of the "traditional" Sunday, we now teeter on the brink of a moral abyss and soon we will slip into a twilight world of unrelieved consumerism.
In fact, all that the House of Commons did was to legitimize the status quo as it has existed for the past several years. The current law on Sunday trading which the Keep Sunday Special campaign wanted to maintain has always been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and so it was clearly a nonsense to keep such a manifestly unworkable law.
As with most of the legislation passed by Parliament, our legislators were hardly pointing the way to a brave new world, but merely confirm
ing the trend already set by the population as a whole -a population that has been literally voting with its feet and queuing up at the supermarket for many years part anyway. The new laws reflect, rightly, the greater complexity and flexibility of the modern working life. Those in other countries, such as Germany, which still maintain tight restrictions on Sunday trading, look on our liberalisation of the law with nothing but envy and pop over here at Christmas time for some long shopping weekends.
Moreover, those who fear that the new laws will lead to a decline in Church attendance, let alone unleash a further decline in the quality of family life, need look no further than America for comfort. The Americans have long raised the practice of shopping to an art form; their malls are the modern cathedrals of popular communal activity, and yet they manage to combine an aggressively mass-consumer culture with by far the highest church attendance rate in the western world.
In America, shopping has always been a cornerstone of family life, and I would expect that supermarkets in this country will quickly adopt the same approach as their American counterparts and start selling products for all the family, and not just that totem of weekend shopping, the unrepentant DIY fanatic.
I suspect therefore, contrary to all the prophets of doom, that in fact church attendance will rise, and that family life will be improved, not diminished, by the new Sunday trading laws. To think otherwise, that the state has a duty to coset the family together in a claustrophobic home for an entire day to somehow improve the nation's "spiritual life", is to show remarkably little faith in human nature.