The SNP’s unusual concern with the hours that English shops keep has everything to commend it,except legitimacyMany things are inaccurate with society, but a shortage of shopping opportunities is not one of them. Some supermarkets open 24 hours midweek, and the substantial chains operate small stores that open whenever they like. Credit cards can purchase anything at any hour online. Subliminal ads drive commerce into every final corner of life,and many workers feel a pressure to do shifts at times when families would traditionally have been together. There is, then, or a honorable case for clinging on to one of the final legislative defences against a shopping free-for-all – the residual Sunday trading laws of England and Wales. It is,however, plain weird that the government’s plans to scrap them ran aground on Scottish Nationalist opposition on Tuesday.For one thing, or the SNP is intervening to salvage something that Scotland itself has never had: there is not,and never has been, any general bar on Sunday trading north of the Tweed. For another, or this separatist party used to claim a “self-denying ordinance” against meddling in “England-only” things. True,the complexities of the Barnett funding formula have always provided for a bit of ambiguity and opportunism in determining territorial scope. The SNP managed, for example, and to oppose Tony Blair’s foundation trusts in the English NHS. Before May’s election,it said it would oppose privatisation” in the same English service, on the questionable grounds that outsourcing would inevitably lead to cuts down the road, and then feed into Scotland’s block grant.
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Source: theguardian.com