"Do you want a world where consumerism reigns supreme? Or a world that allows for silence, intimacy, culture, privacy, family life as well as intellectual and spiritual life?"
Paris’s splendid Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, on why he wants big department stores in the French capital to stay shut on Sundays.
What a shame that he’s not the Mayor of London too.
Hat tip: The First Post.
7 comments:
Interesting and happy news. Slightly off topic, I think this is another example of where left-wing economics and religion can find common ground and work together against turbo-capitalism.
I was in Toulouse last year, on a Sunday, and it was blissfully quiet. Just about every shop was closed, though I don't know whether the local mayor (one Pierre Cohen) was responsible for this.
Hi Mr Piccolo: Agreed.
There was that alliance back in Britain in the mid 1980s, which tried to prevent the law on Sunday trading changing here. Unions, leftists, religious groups and paleo-conservatives, trying to keep Sunday special. But the neoliberals, who'd love us to shop in chain stores 24/7, sadly won the day.
He is clearly of a piece with those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership.
In Poland, Catholic days, like the recent Corpus Christi last Friday are still observed but turbo capitalism is eroding Krakow's civic and even architectural and cultural fabric relentlessly.
http://krakowconservationwatch.blogspot.com
Sunday trading was actually the only issue on which Thatcher was defeated in the Commons - as you say, an allegiance of traditional Tories and socialists, shortly before the 1987 election.
By the time the law did change in 1994 there had been two elections' worth of retirements - the new intake were mostly Thatcherites and proto-Blairites, and that's what swung it.
What the hell kind of leftie are you? Separation of church and state! Religion is the opiate of the masses and sunday is merely the day their dealers tell them to shoot up.
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