The early May Day holiday. The Observer was equivocal. Mrs Thatcher enjoyed it
There is frequent dispute over the question of public holidays in the UK.
The current structure goes back to the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 which recognised the principle of a very small amount of paid time off for the new industrial workforce, and of course bank employees.
The framework has been tweaked since then to add New Year’s Day and differs in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Another recent addition is the May Day Bank Holiday. It was introduced in 1978 by the Callaghan Labour Government. The Tories didn’t much like it then and many still don’t. No complaints this year however as Johnson moved it to mark VE day as Major did in 1995. Why there could not have been an additional holiday to that normal May Day one remains a moot point at best.
The TUC’s view remains that Britain has the fewest public holidays in Europe- but by no means the highest workplace productivity- so a few more holidays in the interests of work-life balance would be a good idea whatever they are called.
Indeed Labour proposed four more bank holidays at the 2019 General Election.
May Day has been a traditional day of celebration, both of spring and of Labour and it is marked in one or other and sometimes both contexts around the world.
The introduction of the official holiday in 1978 did not come without some issues.
Firstly a labour movement tradition- one I still try to hold to personally- has been not to work on May Day, even if this meant taking unofficial strike action.
The traditional London May Day March is still held on the day itself, and prior to 1978 strike action in some years was quite widespread.
So the appearance of the official holiday can be seen as a way of trying to stop such- to those in authority- unfortunate occurrences.
At the same time the complaint of many in the labour movement was that the bank holiday was only on May Day itself if it coincided with a Monday. Otherwise it was on the next available Monday
It is interesting to look back on views of that May Day in the 1970s- when incidentally a BBC report complained that too many shops and public venues were shut to make it enjoyable. This was a feature of all British public holidays until very recently.
We can do this via a House of Lords debate on the holiday that took place on May 9th 1978.
The debate was led off by Viscount Davidson who asked the question whether the Government thought having a May Day bank holiday was ‘wise’ and whether they planned to continue with it.
The Tory Peer claimed that the idea of having a public holiday on May Day was a matter of ‘political ideology’.
Lord Wallace for Labour pointed out that the Christian church had for centuries celebrated May 1st as the day of St Joseph the Worker so the decision to have a UK public holiday was clearly a ‘very respectable’ one.
He went on to point out that the only bad thing about the 1978 May Day holiday had been that it rained but even the then Lib-Lab Pact could not control the elements. In response Lord Alport demanded that if the Government planned to persist with a May Day holiday they must act to ensure that the weather was better.
One might have thought the Thatcher Government from 1979 would have abolished the May Day holiday. Checking the Thatcher Archive however one finds that on Monday May 4th 1981 Mrs T enjoyed lunch with Denis, Mark and Carol, happy as others to have a day off.
In 2017 however an Observer columnist argued that we don’t need Bank Holidays perhaps vaguely recalling the paper’s nineteenth century roots in Manchester liberalism:
However Ms Wiseman will no doubt be content that the early May Day Bank Holiday has been moved to mark VE Day instead and there really should be nobody much on beaches except seagulls.
Francis Wheen provided an entertaining and well informed defence of the holiday here (scroll down)
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