Are Sundays sell-days or are they still special?

The extension may have only been for an extra two hours (eight instead of six), but it has prompted renewed pressure for the new arrangement to be adopted permanently.

Nothing can be done without parliamentary debate, and, needless to say, it has already drawn predictable opposition from political, trade union and religious sources who wish to keep Sundays special.

There’s always been confusion over what can be sold on Sundays and who can sell it. As a university student, I remember Sunday evening as Chinese take-away night because you couldn’t buy fish and chips. You could buy newspapers, and ‘top shelf’ magazines, but not Bibles. London’s Petticoat Lane market was open, but not, in those days, Portobello. Cut flowers were only available from street kiosks, outside underground stations hospitals and cemeteries.

Even churches had restrictions governing which ceremonies could be held on a Sunday.

As lifestyles and work patterns began to swallow up weekends, commercial pressures demanded a relaxation of restrictions on Sunday opening, though not without passionate debate about the very notion of whether trading on the Lord’s day was a legitimate activity.

In the UK, the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 attempted to sort out some anomalies, even if at first the legislation appeared to introduce further complications.

First, the laws applied only to England and Wales. Large shops (those with floor areas exceeding 280 square metres) could open for six hours between 10 am and 6 pm. Objections poured in, not only from those who value Sunday as a day of rest or on religious grounds, but also from small businesses who had relied on weekend trade and feared they would be forced out of business by supermarkets, and from others who could not afford extra weekend staff.

Clearly the argument focused on providing choice, both for consumers and for traders themselves. And so it remains.

We have always had a somewhat ambivalent view of Sundays. While we regard it as a ‘different’ day, we have traditionally wished to continue doing the same things we do on other days.

For example, in the days of formal lunches, it was the custom for families to attend morning church service, then assemble for Sunday lunch at a restaurant in benign disregard of the staffing effort to provide it. We conveniently draw a line around those working in the medical, emergency, broadcasting, farming, transportation and catering spheres.

As we have grown into a 24/7 society, we have become more adept at constructing seven day-a-week staff rotas. Of course it involves cost, but if that’s what is wanted … And, you can’t have it both ways. Increasingly, economic hardship inevitably reopens the debate about choice both for consumers and those wanting to make an honest buck.

Casting the net wider, Scotland has never had general legislation regarding Sunday trading, though employees across the border cannot be forced to work. In France, Sunday remains a special day, especially in rural areas, with no heavy-goods vehicles on the road (unless they are plying emergency or refrigerated loads).

Near my little southern village refuge, the boulangeries operate a rota: what Frenchman wouldn’t expect to collect fresh bread every day of the week? Petrol is available only from motorway services, and though restrictions have recently been relaxed, the local supermarkets open only till lunchtime, which is useful, because everything else is shut, including, strangely, the majority of village cafés.

Here in Jersey, the front page of last Thursday’s JEP carried an advertisement placed by the new outlets in Liberty Wharf shopping centre which proclaimed ‘open Sundays’.

Jersey’s Sunday trading laws were changed in July last year after 50 years regulating a list of items permitted for sale. Like the UK practice, it contained many anomalies. At one time it was illegal to sell cut flowers from garage forecourts on a Sunday.

Moreover, it was virtually unenforceable. Under the new system, the Constables retain their existing discretion to issue permits to those wishing to trade in their parish on Sundays, but stores must only sell what they would normally offer on weekdays. And like the UK, there is a limit on the size of establishment: 700 square metres of floor space.

Coincidentally, the cost of a Sunday trading licence rose from £15 to £50.

Predictably, we heard the same arguments about protecting those who didn’t want to work on Sundays or who objected on principle to stores being open. Then there were gripes from shopkeepers who felt that the onus was on them to prove their premises fitted the bill, and confusion over the ‘special’ five days when supermarkets could open in the run-up to big events such as Christmas or Easter.

There’s never going to be 100 per cent agreement. Indeed, despite our general rush towards consumerism, there seems to be little appetite for UK-style Sunday shopping. A survey two years ago showed that only 30 per cent of the population in Jersey were in favour.

Of course, there’s nothing to restrict internet shopping on Sundays, but it is obvious that there has been a noticeable increase in local premises open for business in St Helier. At least it gives welcome relief to holidaymakers when it rains, occasionally, at weekends, and to day-trippers from France, who seem to arrive blissfully unaware that the town will actually be, erm, closed on Sundays.