May Day echoes of a discontented past

For many parts of the country the weather today promises to be sunny and warm. Forty years ago, when the first May Day Bank Holiday was introduced, it was miserable and wet, in keeping with the mood of the nation. This particular holiday came into being in 1978, not as a celebration of spring but of the international brotherhood of workers. Michael Foot, then employment secretary and later Labour leader, saw it as a way to ingratiate the government with the recalcitrant trade unions. It did not do the party much good: a few months later, a spate of strikes that led to the Winter of Discontent helped destabilise the Callaghan administration, which was brought down the following year.

But the Left-wing ideology that considered such a celebration to be appropriate once again holds sway in the Labour Party. At the weekend, John Mcdonnell, the shadow chancellor, took part in an event to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. He called Marxism “a force for change today” and acknowledged that it was a big influence on Jeremy Corbyn and the party. Capitalism, he argued was “crisis-ridden” and people were embracing Marxism as an alternative. The questions raised by Marx about ownership of the means of production had been revived, he said. Such questions were supposedly answered by Tony Blair’s removal of Clause IV of the party constitution, which committed it to public ownership. But this ambition has now been put back at the heart of Labour’s approach.

The shadow chancellor does not hide these inclinations. He has previously described his “most significant” intellectual influences as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. But as with many on the communist and radical Left he refuses to connect the philosophy with the appalling crimes committed in its name. Their assertion is always that Marxism has “never properly been tried” and, when it is, utopia will follow. Such an attitude is the greatest triumph of hope over experience in history.

Mr Mcdonnell seeks to come across as an avuncular and reasonable individual who would not dismantle the capitalist system and destroy the wealth creators without whom there would be no public services. Yet he has in the past favoured a 60p top rate of tax and would preside over a massive programme of renationalisation. Those who do not consider this a threat to the nation’s wellbeing and are too young to remember the state of the country in 1978 when the May Day holiday was introduced need to mug up on their history.