I want rid of ALL Bank Holidays – not everyone gets them anyway and here in Scotland they are localised and hugely confusing

With the possible exceptions of Easter, Christmas and New Year, how many people actually associate a bank holiday with a specific event though?

Are there huge parties around the country to celebrate labour day?

Frankly, we should stop trying to associate bank holidays with specific ideals, and get an independent commission to work out when it would be most useful for them to take place.

Moving the Easter/Xmas/New Year holidays are going to hit too large a wall of opposition from combinations of secular and religious sorts – but the rest of them are frankly nothing more than an excuse for *some* people to have a day off work and go to the DIY store or down the pub.

The reality that we have a cluster of holidays in spring, and nothing between August and December is not a sensible one, and it makes sense to shift a few of them around.

Obviously, some idiots will see “dark conspiracies” in the idea, when in fact it is just a long overdue tidying up of a very messy situation.

May I suggest October 31st, a day that would accurately reflect the Tories in general and George Osborne in particular

Looks like they are missing Coulson. Surely with the ConDems we need a Mayday more than ever.

When the time comes, and they abandon our Beltane festival, the Big Society should just take a well earnt break- and work traflagar day instead.

“It certainly would not be a very Conservative measure to try to overturn thousands of years of tradition”

Since 1978…

I don’t think most people care about the May Day holiday per se, although I personally think it should be kept. It seems mad to have 2 BH’s in May tho’, and I’d be in favour of moving one to Autumn to even things out.

Alternatively, they could just make it compulsory for people to be able to take their holidays whenever they want…?

Graeme’s point @1 is an interesting one; I think it’s mostly a historic thing that different areas of Scotland had different “local” bank holidays, as well as traditional times for people in the old industries to go on summer holidays (hence the Glasgow Fair and Edinburgh Trades holidays were always different two week periods). I don’t think most people in Scotland found it that difficult or objected to the “localism” involved.

I really couldn’t care. I’ll be forced to take May 1st off this year and it’ll come out of my holiday allowance. I’d rather have the option of picking my own days off.

@Galen10

But now people often live in one authority area but work in another (as I do) yet are supposed to know the bank holidays in both. It’s outdated.

My workplace is nominally a UK employer as a non-devolved government department but has chosen to take one of the ‘local’ bank holidays for Edinburgh, even though the majority of those employed there live in Fife or West Lothian.

As such we don’t get the MayDay bank holiday – it and the August Bank Holiday (which doesn’t officially exist up here anyway) are swapped for a long weekend in September.

Just give us these on our leave allocations and let us decide.

Bank Holidays are an anachronism.

They refer to a society that had real banks and to a population that gave a toss whether their branches were open or closed.

A compulsory day off work is less valuable than one that is chosen.

I would actually prefer to get rid of bank holidays and introduce a minimum number of unpaid holiday days for workers, that way people arent forced to have the day off on days that may mean nothing to them, christmas may not mean much to some, easter not much to others, may day for others still, let the people decide for themselves which days they want off imo

“Although May Day was slotted into the modern bank holiday schema in 1978, it is actually one of the oldest days of celebration in the UK.

Marking the return of spring is an important part of our Celtic tradition,”

Ahem:

“The Whitsun bank holiday (Whit Monday) was replaced by the Late Spring Bank Holiday – fixed as the last Monday in May – in 1971.”

So, we’ve got that sorted already then.

As to one in the autumn, Oct 21 or 25 seems about right. Pissing off the French is, after all, a noble and long lived English tradition.

“A compulsory day off work is less valuable than one that is chosen.”

For this year’s royal wedding, I’m planning to turn up to work for this reason alone.

“As to one in the autumn, Oct 21 or 25 seems about right. Pissing off the French is, after all, a noble and long lived English tradition.”

So perfect for a UK holiday when schoools are already off in many parts.

What IanVisits Said. I don’t know anyone who associates May Day with socialism, a couple of pagans who see it as a religious holiday, but they’re used to not getting bank holidays for their religious days.

Between 25 December and the end of May (a little over five months) we have seven bank holidays, in the remaining seven months we have one. Personally I find the workers perspective in these being days off that everyone is entitled to (if your job requires you to work that day you are entitled to the day’s holiday in lieu) and the long drag is depressing.

I can see two routes out of this, either rearrange them to spread more throughout the year, which will mean telling religious groups that no, they can’t force us all to observe their holy days with a double public holiday, or add the days to paid holiday entitlement, so that I can take them when it suits my holiday, leisure or diy plans. The second of these is my preferred option, although perhaps some right to take them as single days (eg long weekends) should be maintained so that they can’t be included in “factory fortnights”.

What a bunch of bloody miseries! “I can’t have a holiday / I find it confusing / it’s not a day off for banks / so let’s abolish it.” seems to be the sentiment.

Holidays are good. How far will this anti-holiday efficiency go? Sundays have gone, next Bank Holidays. When do people have a chance to be on free time at the same time in this vision of the world? Do the same anti-holdayers bemoan the loss of community spirit and wonder why?

Cherub:
Of course I can’t speak for the others but it’s not that I’m anti-holiday, merely that I’d rather have the holiday when I chose, co-ordinating with those others with whom I want to spend time. Failing that I would like to have those holidays evenly through the year (which is how I would take them if they were added to my annual leave entitlement), rather than a rash of them in the spring and then only one in the over more than half of the year. It would also then deal with the problems of, for example, the five Sikhs in the office who get two days off for Easter which means nothing to them and then have to dip into their holiday entitlement for Vaisakhi, one of their most sacred holidays. They could opt to work around Easter and then have free time at the same time as a lot of other Sikhs when it matters to them.

It would be nice if more employers didn’t take bank holidays out of your annual leave allowance if they don’t actually bother opening on the bank holidays themselves.

Separately from whenever May Day should be, we *should* mandate 25 days of holiday per year for everybody, and at the same time we *should* say that some of them (including Christmas Day, New Years Day and Easter, plus appropriate ones for other faiths – say, Diwali, Passover and Eid) are ones that an employer can’t refuse to grant if the employee insists, but which you can choose to opt out of working if you like. If society deems it appropriate, the “can’t refuse” list should include Britishness Day or Workers Day or whatever we end up with.

A very large company I once worked for had an excellent scheme, under which all public holidays were given as public holidays, but otherwise you had 20 days of holiday – and could buy another 10 out of your wages at your salaried rate. In an ideal world, this would be universally applied.

@ johnb

You’re right. You make a good case for the way progressives should look at holiday rights

Complaints about having to take Bank Holidays out of annual leave cannot be blamed upon the existence of Bank Holidays, it’s the policy of the employer one should take issue with.

At times of economic difficulty the loss of some hard-won rights may be thought to be acceptable. However when times improve these rights are seldom reinstated.

I know there are wider issues, but blaming public holidays for an employers’ stinginess is getting the issue the wrong way round.

Good title!

I really don’t see a problem with moving the holiday. There’s a notable lack of bank holidays in the autumn – you jump straight from the August bank holiday weekend to Christmas Day. Considering that Christmas is closely followed by two holidays and that they are scattered throughout spring, it’s not unreasonable to balance things out a bit.

I’m genuinely surprised to see such miserable, defeatist, conformist views expressed on an allegedly ‘progressive’ (what does that word even mean?) site…

Cherub @15 has it.

May day has been a traditional folk festival for centuries in England (whatever you think of Maypoles or Morris dancing) as well as being International Workers’ Day. Why allow it to be surrendered, and to the “DCMS tourism strategy” of all causes?

For those suggesting that holidays should be scheduled to maximise “efficiency” – efficiency for whom, exactly? If you want a day off in late summer / autumn, then fight for an additional one – it’s not like we have a staggering number of public holidays in the UK now, is it?

For those suggesting that the concept of public holidays is antiquated and you’d rather use annual leave – fuck, what a sad state of affairs, when even holidays are turned into commodities to be bought, sold, traded!

Of course, many of these holidays were introduced when annual leave didn’t exist for the majority of the working population… Remove the ‘public’ from ‘holiday’ and you’ve got nothing left when the government start pissing about with the ‘statutory minimum’ number of days off a year – and, believe me, they will.

@ 17 Cylux

“It would be nice if more employers didn’t take bank holidays out of your annual leave allowance if they don’t actually bother opening on the bank holidays themselves.”

I thought bank holidays were a legal entitlement, separate from your holiday allowance? I worked for a bank once that was pretty domineering and grasping about when you could take time off – it had a “use it or lose it” policy that came perilously close to being a de facto “lose it” policy because so many dates were unavailable – but if your shift meant you had to work on a bank holiday, you got a day off in lieu.

It’s possible that employers think in terms of total holiday – so that’s annual leave and bank holidays combined – especially if it doesn’t close on bank holidays. But if they claim to provide 30 days’ leave a year (or whatever) but closer inspection shows that they’re using bank holidays to make up the numbers, that might be false advertising.

11 Tim Worstall

“As to one in the autumn, Oct 21 or 25 seems about right. Pissing off the French is, after all, a noble and long lived English tradition.”

Soooo.. north of the border they could have 24th June; perhaps 6th April is a tad too close to May

@Galen10

or anyone who can tell me what happened on 24 June or 6 April?

Not getting the joke here.

24 th June is Bannockburn. Dunno the other. Stirling?

24

6th April 1320: The Declaration of Arbroath

What is supposed to be the point of requiring everyone to take a holiday on the same day?

@ 27

“What is supposed to be the point of requiring everyone to take a holiday on the same day?”

Originally, they were either to allow people to observe religious ceremonies or a sort of bread and circuses. Now they’re just traditions that no politician wants to take away for fear of looking bad. Although you could argue that Christmas as a family tradition takes an almost religious importance even among non-believers: if you took away May Day I’d be annoyed but understanding; if you took away Christmas I’d be livid.

@28 Chaise

I don’t think you’re thinking enough about other people and what they do on Bank Holidays. Amateur sports often base big events around them, communities use them for community events such as fetes. To do away with them would be another step towards a bland characterless Land of Accountants’ Dreams.

“I don’t think you’re thinking enough about other people and what they do on Bank Holidays. Amateur sports often base big events around them, communities use them for community events such as fetes.”

There’s another name for the time when people do these things too.

“Weekends”.

Don’t forget, when bank holidays were first introduced (1871) Saturday was a working day for most…..

29 good point

I’m also surprised that Tim W hasn’t flagged-up the increased income created by bank holidays which would be lost if we were able to choose our own.

@ 29 Cherub

I’m hardly advocating doing away with them. I’m just saying that, while I would not be in favour of cancelling most bank holidays, I would at least sympathise with the opposition’s POV. Christmas is different. It’s firmly engrained as an important day in the mind of almost everyone who doesn’t follow a non-Christian religion.

Pitiful Ideological bullying is all that this amounts to. The Brownshirts have always hated the May day bank holiday for political reasons. It shows how petty they are. Pathetic.

On the more practical point, May day is quite often a very nice warm day with lighter evenings than in the Autumn. Much better to have a day off then than in the later part of the year. But brown shirts don’t really want their slaves to have any time off at all.

@30 Tim

You might have weekends in Portugal but they’ve been all but done away with here.

“I’m also surprised that Tim W hasn’t flagged-up the increased income created by bank holidays which would be lost if we were able to choose our own.”

Err, because that would be nonsensical?

If everyone takes 8 days off on the same 8 days or everyone takes 8 days off when they desire, on different days, the change in income is exactly the same: everyone’s just taken 8 days off.

BTW, the canonical ASI view is that we should abolish bank holidays altogether and simply add them to holiday entitlement which can then be taken as people wish.

Why shouldn’t you have the freedom to not only do what you wish in your free time but also decide when that free time should be?

“You might have weekends in Portugal but they’ve been all but done away with here.”

Rilly? Peeps are back to working 6 and 7 day weeks?

Wow, NuLabour was more exploitatively capitalist than I thought.

@ 35 Tim W

“If everyone takes 8 days off on the same 8 days or everyone takes 8 days off when they desire, on different days, the change in income is exactly the same: everyone’s just taken 8 days off. ”

I was thinking that, but wouldn’t you have to factor in the probability that a bank holiday observed by most of the population would likely be used for big public events like fairs and fetes and the like, which would presumably help to grease the wheels of the economy?

Chaise,

For that to work, you’d have to somehow argue that the consumption of the non-working enjoyers of the holiday outweighed their production on a normal working day, which is unlikely.

For those trying to claim May Day is a pagan/ancestral festival, get a grip. The known pagan festivals in these islands are the solstices and equinoxes (Bel Tine (Celtic name) in Summer, the various forms of Halloween in Autumn, the ancestors of Christmas in Winter and Eostre (English name) in Spring). There may well have been other festivals linked to these, but we don’t have pre-Christian documentation to tell us. What was common (and still happens in Scotland) is that each locality had its own festival dates for fairs and the like in the middle ages, which did not clash. Here it was that ‘folk traditions’ (actually just normal entertainment) such as morris dancing took place, at a different time in each place. You cannot historically claim May Day as a particular festival since it has no Christian significance (the festivals at that time of year being migratory in the callendar), no proven pagan links and no universal historical applicability.

Now if you wanted to argue for keeping May Day as International Workers day (especially if you suggested moving the horrible late-May Bank Holiday instread), that might be a honest case.

Chaise,

“I was thinking that, but wouldn’t you have to factor in the probability that a bank holiday observed by most of the population would likely be used for big public events like fairs and fetes and the like, which would presumably help to grease the wheels of the economy?”

This would have been true back when May Day (or more accurately Roodmass/Whitsun) were popular days for early year fairs (first sales of young animals, hiring for summer, first crops of spring vegetables), and when therefore almost all of a community would come out and participate – doing business and spending excess money (historically most families had this most of the time – subsistence living tends to mean you have a bit more than the minimum more often than not). It is less true now – when people like me (without children) often chose not to travel places on bank holidays but wait for the ‘dead’ weekend afterwards because it is quieter, and when my productivity is apparently far more valuable than my ability to spend my wages on a bank holiday (unless I buy a new house or something…).

Basically, there is no single community action to justify bank holidays economically, especially since we now work less and have more time in which to spend increased money.

Arghh – how the hell did that happen.

First paragraph of 38 belongs with 39…

Confused!

@ 38 Watchman

“For that to work, you’d have to somehow argue that the consumption of the non-working enjoyers of the holiday outweighed their production on a normal working day, which is unlikely.”

You misunderstand me. I’m not saying that bank holidays are a net benefit to the economy, which I doubt (unless you get statistically dodgy and put all off the Xmas spending down to it being a day off). I’m saying that having X days that the majority of people all take off at the same time – Good Friday, May Day, the August bank holiday – is arguably more beneficial to the economy than just giving everyone the same number of days to take off at a time agreed between them and their employer. The reason being that a day that almost everyone has off work is a great day to organize an event of some kind.

By the way, who moved the comment box so it’s at the opposite end of thread to where comments get posted? Damnfool idea in my opinion. Still, you can’t fight progress.

Since many businesses do up to 80% of their annual turnover at Christmas its obvious we need Christmas II sometime in June. No snow blocking eager shoppers from spending money they haven’t got on crap they don’t need for people who’ll take it back for a refund, warmer weather encouraging even more drinking and a second opportunity to persuade normally sane people to eat sprouts and cranberries. There are problems though, principally the (residual) association of Christmas with peace, goodwill and charity, things which make Tories wither faster than George Osborne in sunlight. So we’ll need something a bit more muscular to market it with, something like “Jesus is back and this time its personal” or a Samuel L Jackson style Santa “Have you been naughty or nice? WELL WHICH IS IT MOTHERF*****?”. After all, if the monarch can have two birthdays a year why not the saviour of mankind*

*still pending verification

Or how about simply changing Pheasant Shooting season to Peasant Shooting season and letting Tories with gold plated Purdeys loose on council estates. Perhaps not though, drug dealing hoodies with Glocks would be too unsporting for a class that only likes shooting at things that pose no potential risk of retaliation