No, because I want to finish as soon as possible to obey the Speaker.
5.15 pm
The change will put enormous pressure on local authorities and that pressure will be one way. In my local authority area, we have a Tesco, a Morrisons and all the rest of it. If a big store opens up in Lincoln, Tesco will go to West Lindsey District Council and say, “Unless you agree to deregulate and allow us to open all hours on a Sunday, we will close the Tesco in Gainsborough and put 400 people out of work.” This will be the thin edge of the wedge. Wonderful Asian people in all our communities are struggling to keep small shops going, and this will be another nail in their coffin. The Conservative party is not only the party of big business and prosperity, but that of small people, struggling entrepreneurs and the family. That is what this is about.
Sunday is not only an issue for Christians. The former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote in Prospect:
“Britain used to have its own Sabbath every Sunday. Then it was deregulated and privatised. Holy days became holidays, sacred time became free time and rest became leisure. The assumption was that everyone would benefit because we could all decide for ourselves how to spend the day. This was and remains a fallacy.”
He went on to mention Émile Durkheim’s work on the dangers of individualism and societal breakdown. The Conservative party is not just about individualism; it is about society as a whole. We know the dangers and costs of societal breakdown, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who is sitting behind you, Mr Speaker, has done work on this issue with the DWP’s social justice team. To return to Lord Sacks, he wrote in 2009:
“British culture once had an inner poise and balance…Twenty years of a seven-day-a-week consumer culture has not made Britons measurably happier.”
Our society is becoming more atomised and divided. I say to my hon. Friends that there is a sound, traditional, Conservative case for putting the family first and voting for the amendment.