In retrospect: Marx, Thatcher, and Sunday shopping

Pic: In Wales it was worse. All pubs there were shut on Sundays until 1961, and the "dry Sunday" was abolished across Wales only in 1996.

Sunday was a strange day growing up in the late fifties and early sixties. My grandfather would send me on fruitless errands to buy newspapers that no longer existed: Lloyd’s Weekly, or if they didn’t have that Reynold's News. Both publications were politically left of centre, the later owned at one time by the Co-operative Party, but they’d folded many years prior. Unfortunately the replacement for these half-way decent journals in our house became the News of the World.

Another oddity arose when my parents sent me out for ice cream. "Go up Pascal’s (corner shop owned by an Italian family) and buy a block of Wall’s Neapolitan ice cream". Any other day Pascal didn’t bother, but on Sundays he put said block in a paper bag.

It was all to do with Sunday trading laws. Shops weren’t supposed to sell ice cream on Sunday. Neither apparently could they sell bibles, although the purchase of semi-pornographic magazines was OK. Corner shops had to close by 1pm. More or less all other shops didn’t even open on a Sunday.

We had no trips to IKEA or B&Q, as they weren’t around at the time. Seven o’clock at night was the magic hour when the pubs opened.

The hour before that was for me the most depressing in the entire week. There were few things halfway entertaining to watch on the two TV stations available. No joy was to be found on the only three radio stations (all BBC) allowed to broadcast in Britain at the time, only one of which - The Light Programme - deigned to cater for "popular taste" (i.e. the majority of the population!).

Should anyone ever get a pub quiz question, "what was the longest-running continuous music programme in the world?" the answer is Sing Something Simple. Featuring a group of singers accompanied by an accordion, it ran for 42 years, before the BBC mercifully wound it up in 2001.

The lyrics to its opening theme began:

Sing something simple

As cares go by

Sing something simple

Just you and I

Yet what does all the belly aching about how shite Sundays were back in the day and the laws governing them have to do with socialists? Interestingly, historical opponents of Sunday Trading Laws include Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher. One of them opposed legal changes harmful to the working classes, whilst the other supported them. You don’t need to be a genius to work which was which!

Although Sunday is still regarded as "a day of rest", a section of the English ruling class in 1855 wanted to make it a day where the working population were unable to do pretty much anything. Marx reported on agitation against the Sunday Trading Bill that year, calling it an attempt at religious coercion against the working class by the English aristocracy and the Established Church.

At that time factory workers did a six day week, their working hours only recently reduced to ten a day by the 1847 Factory Act.

“The working class receives its wages late on Saturday,” Marx wrote. “Sunday trading, therefore, exists solely for them. They are the only section of the population forced to make their small purchases on Sundays, and the new Bill is directed at them alone.”

Sunday was an ideal day for mass demonstrations in Hyde Park against the Bill, and one attracted at least 200,000. The protesters particularly targeted the Sunday parade of the aristocracy along the roads around the Serpentine in “their magnificent carriages with all their trappings … followed by swarms of lackeys.”

The Chartists plastered the following poster throughout London:

"New Sunday Bill prohibiting newspapers, shaving, smoking, eating and drinking and all other kinds of recreation and nourishment …which the poor people still enjoy at the present time. An open air meeting of artisans, workers and ‘the lower orders’ … will take place in Hyde Park … to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath and how anxious it is not to employ its servants and horses on that day".

Chartist leader James Finley declared on the demo: “We are enslaved for six days a week and Parliament wants to rob us of our bit of freedom on the seventh.” The crowd formed circles around Finley to prevent the police arresting him.

The working class were additionally outraged by the Bill because they didn’t have a voice in parliament. The strength of numbers and feeling shown on the demonstrations, which involved numerous arrests and battles with the police, obliged the government to drop the Bill. Some soldiers recently returned from the Crimean War had been among protesters fighting the police.

Universal suffrage and the growth of trade-union power led to the five day working week becoming standard for some British workers by the 1930s, and for most by the 1960s. The Holiday Pay Act 1938 gave many a week’s paid holiday. Saturday became an added day’s relief from work, and Friday and Saturday nights chances to socialise.

The 1960 film of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning paints a pretty accurate picture of how many working class people spent their leisure time in the early 1960s. In another film from that era, The Ipcress File, the Michael Caine character encounters his boss in a supermarket declaring: “I don’t really care for these American shopping methods. One has to move with the times, I suppose.”

Indeed the advent of the supermarket in the1960s transformed the way people shopped for groceries. Before we would ask the shopkeeper to give us the goods. Now shoppers got them off the shelf, and later scanned the shopping and bagged it.

The welfare of shop workers was an important provision of the 1950 Shop Act passed by the Attlee Labour government. It laid out mandatory working conditions, including limits on hours, mandatory breaks, and a legal stipulation to provide suitable seating for female workers. There was also a requirement for half-day closing during the working week. Although enacted before the advent of supermarkets, the Act prohibited them from opening on Sundays.

Just like those in the time of Karl Marx, the rich always like workers to be at their beck and call. That’s why they find places like Dubai, with no workers’ rights, so attractive to live in. It was therefore unsurprising that Margaret Thatcher wanted to get rid of Sunday Trading laws when she proposed the Shops Bill in 1986 which aimed to make retail outlets "open all hours".

The Labour Party and the unions opposed the bill for the understandable reason that shop workers would be forced to work on Sundays. "Social conservatives" in the Tory Party didn’t like it either, and it became the only government Bill thrown out during Thatcher’s tenure. A watered down version of the bill was subsequently passed under John Major in 1994. with large shops opening on Sundays with restricted hours.

Retail workers are a neglected ten percent (2.75 million) of the UK working class. You rarely hea of them going on strike, perhaps because the main union representing them is Usdaw, which claims 360,000 members, is affiliated to the Co-operative Party and considered to be on the right wing of the Labour Party. Back in the seventies its executive members were exclusively male despite the fact that most of the membership were women. It took 45 years from its foundation before a woman, Audrey Wise, became Union president in 1991.

The current Usdaw stance is to oppose extending large shop opening from the maximum of six hours on Sundays and to give workers the right to opt out from working Sunday shifts. How the latter demand is to be enforced is problematic given the weak union organisation of retail workers.

Employment in the retail sector is also in decline due to the growth of shopping online. The bigger the loss of shops on the high street, the more likely people in those areas are likely to vote for Farage. Shop workers are also at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis when it comes to abuse and threats from some shoplifters, and many are subject to zero-hours contracts.

Sunday has certainly changed since Marx’s time. An enforced "day of rest" has now become a day for conspicuous consumption, albeit with limited shopping hours. And as for those effectively forced to stack the supermarket shelves in the likes of Tesco on Christmas Day, let there be an end to it!

A socialist society will not bow down to God or Mammon. There should be free time for all to enjoy and the unions should do more to protect the pay and working conditions of those who work in the retail sector. §