Kmflett's Blog

August is what was and perhaps in some places still is known as High Summer.

In England and Wales school students are on holiday and others are at the beach somewhere, probably not in the UK unless its Cornwall.

Obviously its also raining as is traditional in the English August (one wonders how Peterloo on Monday 16th August 1819 would have turned out if it had rained?)

Yet August is changing as the focus of the market economy changes. Not so long I would set time aside during the month for various longer term projects that I didnt get time to do during the rest of the year. Now I dont get time to do them in August either. Meetings and calls continue as normal,

The House of Commons is in recess but the political world rolls on too and has at least since the campaign for the Labour leadership in the summer of 2015 took place

Of course August was also traditionally the silly season. In 1997 while Mr Blair was elsewhere John Prescott was acting PM and wandering on a beach compared a crab he had found to Peter Mandelson. Cue hold the front page. I suppose the nearest equivalent we’ve had this month is Caroline Lucas’s proposal for a National Government excluding pretty much anyone except a narrow group of people who she thought might think like her. It was a diversion from the troubles of the world for a moment or two.

In Victorian times- the right to any time off for working people started with the 1871 Bank Holidays Act, August also meant work if you could get it.

As Raphael Samuel noted in his long essay Comers and Goers during August the well off went on holiday and that meant less work for a range of occupations. He notes that the ‘indoor trades’ that provided goods for the world of rank and fashion found little business in August while women workers were particularly badly hit as those who used the services of hairdressers and laundresses went on holiday to the the UK seaside. Factory work was also hard to come by. Samuel notes that at one of the East End’s biggest employers Allen and Hanbury in Bethnal Green 25% of women workers were sacked every summer.

August it seems provides one of the conundrums of the market economy. Is it better to have regular work or have a holiday? Perhaps both wouldnt be a bad plan