Even Stalin didn’t dare kill off Sundays – but the Tories will

THOSE who thought Margaret Thatcher was a conservative should have realised she wasn’t when she wrecked the British Sunday. Is there anyone who really needs supermarkets and other big stores to be open on Sunday? I don’t remember starving back in the old days when such shops were closed.

As for it being vital to our economy, Germany – whose economy is vastly healthier than ours – has the strictest Sunday closing laws in the world.

Doesn’t every home need a still, untroubled day of rest, when everyone can relax at the same time?

Even Joseph Stalin, at the height of his Marxist rage against private life, failed to abolish the Sabbath. It took Britain’s Tories to succeed where he failed.

And now, after an ‘experiment’ in longer Sunday hours during the Olympics (and what have the Olympics to do with Sunday shopping in the first place?), Downing Street is talking about extending it.

This will mean more pressure on shop workers to work on Sunday, and more small shops put out of business by the incessant greed and ruthlessness of the supermarkets.

The Tory Party rightly points out that Labour is in the pocket of the unions. But both major parties are the puppets of hypermarket giants.

And here I must put in a good word for Vince Cable, who is (as so often) being smeared and blackguarded by the whispers of Westminster’s professional backstairscrawlers and their media receptacles. Mr Cable is standing out against making longer opening hours permanent.

In doing so, he is quite properly being consistent with what

he said to Parlia- ment on April 30: ‘There is the suspicion, which we have already had aired, that the Bill is a Trojan horse preparing the way for a permanent relaxation of the rules. It is not.’ But what about his Tory colleague Mark Prisk, who told the Commons with equal clarity: ‘We have no intention of making the measure permanent’?

There’s a lot of tripe talked about how ripping up the rules that make life bearable in this country – from Sunday trading to the green belt – will save our failing economy.

It won’t. It will just turn a once pleasant landscape into a hooting, yelling version of Istanbul, a paradise for greed, and nothing to see for miles and miles but traffic jams, concrete and plastic.

WHY did the BBC choose Russell Brand, the alleged comedian (and tormentor of Andrew Sachs), to make a documentary about drugs? Apparently, admitting to having used a lot of illegal drugs makes you an expert.

When I challenged Mr Brand’s qualifications on live TV, he screeched at me a bit, then offered to kiss me. I declined.

A viewer complained about the way I was treated on this programme, and was told ‘…as impartiality is the cornerstone of our entire programme-making process there is certainly no bias against Peter Hitchens’.

I am going to have this sentence stuffed and mounted, so I can keep it in a glass case.