OUR disclosures yesterday about Le Friquet Garden Centre and the dispute about whether it complies fully with the Sunday trading provisions highlights again the problems caused by this legislation.

Whether Castel douzaine is called to a judicial review for not implementing the regulations sufficiently stringently or not, one thing is clear.

Officialdom is unlikely to rest until it has proposed changes to the law so that it can control that which did not exist when the current rules were pieced together to control the sale of wrapping paper and tinsel out of season on a Sunday.

What ought to be asked, however, is why this is necessary in the first place.

Since an outright ban on Sunday trading is out of the question, all the current red tape flows from trying to define what can and can’t be sold.

Quite what affair of government it is to dictate when businesses open is probably lost in time but the resultant nonsense is today’s problem.

Which is why you can hire a bicycle to someone on the Sabbath but not sell them trouser clips without a licence.

In the last 17 years, the issue has been before the States on 12 occasions and is still a pointless dog’s breakfast of rules that simply are not necessary.

Yes, the law keeps bureaucrats and legal draftsmen in expensive and lavishly pensioned employment but it advances this society not one jot.

What it does do, however, is expose the absence of any moral, ethical or religious basis for the restrictions – because expediency can override them.

Pharmacists can sell whatever they have, unrestricted, because that is the deal that had to be struck to get them to provide the rota chemist service.

It is only for one hour but, as in the case of Le Friquet, since the sky does not fall in, why not two hours, or eight?

When Commerce and Employment sits down to try to head off a court clash between States and Castel douzaine, it must avoid the soft option of further tinkering with a discredited law.

It is time to throw out the dog’s breakfast.