I HOPE to God Sundays aren’t spoilt by this government.

The Chancellor George Osborne wants shops to be open for longer hours on the seventh day – but I think it will be a disaster.

Not for religious reasons – I have to confess I had enough of Sunday services in my local church when I was growing up.

No, it’s because we need a change of pace in our weekly grind. The working week becomes more and more stressful, with pressures on workers increasing as they are expected to pack more work into the same number of hours, children’s lives are more pressurised for a variety of reasons (documented in study after study showing that more and more are suffering stress-related physical and psychological illnesses), and families are under increasing strain as relationships break down.

Sundays are a time to breathe, to mentally say goodbye to the previous week and just chill out before the start of the new week. It’s the day of the lie-in, when Sunday mornings are abnormally quiet and you can have tea in bed with a Sunday paper – for hours.

It’s the day when parents take their children out into the countryside to get some fresh air and enjoy nature – something that they don’t or can’t do on any other day of the week because of work and school. It’s the day of the long, relaxed family Sunday lunch, when families go and fetch an elderly relative to join them, and you can make a meal last for a couple of hours or longer because time doesn’t matter for once.

It’s the day when, as a society, we call a mutually agreed truce and slow down our pace of life.

However, many people regard Sundays as boring because “there’s nothing to do”, but that is precisely their value.

Boredom benefits us psychologically because on a Sunday we give ourselves permission to empty our minds for a brief period once a week and take a step back from normal life.

A change is as good as a rest – and that is what Sundays do for us.

They allow us to recuperate and regroup, to prepare us for another round of work.

Sundays as we knew them came under attack in 1994, when the Sunday Trading Act relaxed the previously strict laws and allowed shops to open, albeit with the restriction of only six continuous hours of trading for larger shops.

Governments appear only to have the economy in mind, and not our psychological wellbeing, and so rather than allowing the working public its one day of peace a week, politicians plan for it to become a free-for-all, shops open all hours on the Sabbath, so that it becomes just like any other day of the week. It will set a dangerous precedent – once trading hours for shops become a seven-day-a-week normality, the argument that other businesses should be able to do the same will collapse and we will all come under pressure to work at the weekends.

I worry that complete deregulation of trading will have the same effect as the relaxation of the drinking laws: everybody thought people would pace their drinking and therefore drink less and more responsibly.

How wrong they were. Britain’s drinking problem has increased dramatically – witness the carnage on Brighton’s West Street every Friday and Saturday night.

And the traumatic truth is that the steady increase in binge drinking has led to and will continue to lead to deaths.

Some directly – including all the young men and women murdered virtually every weekend around the country as a result of drink-fuelled temper, and the car crashes from drink driving. And some indirectly – for example, the liver failure sparked by uncontrolled drinking.

And the same with sugar: the easy availability of sweets and the freedom of manufacturers to add sugar to everyday foods, either openly or secretly, has meant a collective addiction to it, leading to massive health problems, including obesity, diabetes and rotting teeth.

As a society we need to be protected from our excesses, for it seems that we do take things to the extreme when given greater choice and freedom.

So what will our new Sundays be like?

It will be noisy. There will be a new rush hour to get to the shops in the morning and back again in the evening. It will be stressful. When people are forced together in limited spaces they get twitchy and angry.

It will be expensive. Like going to a supermarket when you’re hungry, people will buy things they don’t want, don’t need and can’t afford, just because they’re there.

And it will be dumbed down. Because when the masses are preoccupied with shallow time-wasting trivia, they don’t have time to think about bigger issues in society and will opt to shop rather than take action. And Sundays will simply join the never-ending hamster wheel of life, with no chance of getting off, slowing down, enjoying a bit of peace.

Let’s keep Sundays special.