McKinnon was prompted to raise the issue again because this year Boxing Day, which marks the start of the January Sales, falls on a Sunday. He points out that last December, 20,000 people were queuing outside The Trafford Centre on the Sunday after Christmas, and other major schemes like thecentre:mk and Bluewater reported similar queues. For McKinnon this demonstrates that there is a clear appetite for shopping on Sunday.

And he doesn’t just want to see the laws relaxed for Christmas. He believes the time has come for the rest of the UK to fall in line with Scotland, where retailers are free to open any time on the Sabbath.

Since Sunday Trading was permitted in England and Wales in 1994, small stores of under 3,000 sq ft have been able to open at their discretion. But larger stores have been restricted to six hours’ trade. Most choose 11am to 5pm but some choose 10am to 4pm and a few noon until 6pm.

Increasingly stores are pushing at the limits by opening early for ‘browsing time’ which allows customers to shop provided no transactions go through the till before the legal opening time.

The last serious challenge to the status quo came in 2005, when the government carried out a public consultation exercise into liberalisation of the Sunday Trading laws. Research commissioned by the government from economic consultants Indepen concluded that liberalisation would deliver measurable economic benefits. But the government decided not to act after co-ordinated lobbying from the opponents of change.

Two distinct groups oppose loosening the restrictions: Usdaw, the shop-workers union, and Christian groups, predominantly from the evangelical wing of the church. Under the banner of the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign, they successfully convinced Alistair Darling, then Business Secretary, not to follow the economists’ advice.

The campaign led on the potential damage that extended Sunday trading hours would cause to the family lives and the religious rights of shopworkers, despite the fact that the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives them (provided they are not employed to work solely on Sundays) the right to opt-out of working on Sundays.

Since then there has been sporadic activity around the issue: in 2008 Usdaw polled 500 shopworkers and found that 92 per cent of shopworkers reject any relaxation of the present rules.

Usdaw general secretary John Hannett said at the time: “Our survey also found that 56 per cent of our members actually want to work less hours on a Sunday because this is the one day that they have a fighting chance to be at home with their families in what is already the most deregulated retail market in Europe.”

Keep Sunday Special also used polling to justify its opposition, and it found that the numbers of people who thought Sunday should be protected as a family day increased slightly from 78 per cent in 1986 to 81 per cent in 2007. Similarly, the number of people who would not be bothered at all if large shops shut on Sundays, grew from 67 per cent in 1986 to 73 per cent in 2007.

Part of the problem is that there is no similar organisation marshalling the opposing arguments. The British Retail Consortium feels unable to campaign on the issue because there is no clear consensus in favour among its membership, many of whom operate smaller stores and would therefore stand to lose out if their larger rivals opened for longer.

And even some large-format retailers feel that longer hours would add to their staff and other costs without materially increasing spend.

So, it is left to lone voices like Gordon McKinnon and Robert Goodman from Milton Keynes to fight what is essentially a libertarian argument that retailers should be free to trade, and shoppers free to shop, when they choose, provided the rights of those who choose not to are adequately protected.

The internet never closes, and the latest BRC figures show online spend growing 15 per cent year-on-year, while spend on the high street and in malls is barely keeping pace with inflation. As physical shops come under more pressure, the argument in favour of relaxing the restrictions on Sunday trade are only going to become stronger.

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