Campaigners push to ‘keep Sunday special’

Press, 11 January 1986, Page 9

Campaigners push to ‘keep Sunday special’

NZPA-Reuter London

More than 600 balloons carrying the slogan “Keep Sunday special” were released .from the heart of London yesterday to launch a campaign against plans to let shops open freely on the Christian sabbath.

Church leaders, trade unionists, retailers and politicians of Britain’s main parties joined an emotional battle against a Government proposal for the deregulation of Sunday trading. They described it as an attack on a centuries-old tradition, arguing that the result would be higher prices, the closing of thousands of small shops and a fundamental change in national life.

“People should know that the Sunday we now enjoy is in real danger of disappearing for ever, to become little more than another

commercial Saturday,” said the director of the “Keep Sunday Special” campaign, Mr Michael Schluter.

Messages of support came from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, and dignitaries of other Christian denominations.

“It is right that Sunday be set aside for the worship of God and for the well-being of all our people,” Dr Runcie said.

The campaign chairman, Viscount Brentford, said “Perhaps never before have the churches been so united on any issue in this country.”

The Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s, Conservative Government is

pushing the legislation through Parliament and it could go on the statute book within the next few months. The Shops Bill is designed to replace a law which

forbids Sunday trading but is jammed with peculiar exceptions and has been widely flouted. Opinion polls show a majority of Britons want to get rid of it.

Leaders of the new campaign said they were quite willing to see the law rationalised to remove such anomalies as allowing shops to sell “girlie” magazines but not bibles on the Sabbath.

“But if this legislation is enacted in its current form, there could soon be an extra million people who have to go work on Sunday — most of them women,” said Mr Schluter.

“This means that there could be nearly a million families without Mum at home for the Sunday lunch,” he said.