Sunday trading laws: Awake, puritans of England, this is your moment

On the face of it, nothing could be more absurd, or riper for superannuation, than the Sunday trading laws, those hidebound proscriptions from a vanished age – or so the argument runs – that prevent a shop with more than 3,000 square feet of space from opening its doors for more than six hours on the Sabbath. And nothing, surely, could be more symbolic of the Chancellor’s plans to, as he rather coyly put it, “ensure a truly national recovery”, here in our high-octane consumer-driven, 24/7 society, than the scheme announced in last week’s Budget to allow individual communities to decide whether or not these rules for England and Wales should be relaxed.