We don’t need a ‘Thank Holiday’. We need a national day to celebrate the UK

Why not scrap the socialist May bank holiday, and use the first of May to honour the Acts of Union instead?

Should we have a new bank holiday? The idea gaining support in Whitehall to turn the additional day off in June for the Platinum Jubilee into an annual “Thank Holiday” is characteristically sentimental rather than hard-headed. Boris Johnson is said to be considering the plan in recognition of the millions who served their communities during the Covid pandemic. He is trying to persuade the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, since the Treasury would have to sign off a new bank holiday.

But while this is very thoughtful of the Prime Minister, does the public really want a day off loftily handed down as a reward for coping with a lockdown imposed by the Government? What we really need is a National Day. We are one of only two countries in the world that does not have one, the other being Denmark though even they have a Constitution Day. Perhaps only states that have been invaded, occupied, colonised or had revolutions have national days, which would explain why we don’t, as none of these have happened to us for centuries.

While the French are en fête on Bastille Day and the Americans celebrate their independence on July 4 with barbecues and beer, we have nothing. A “Thank Holiday” will not cut it. Rather than manufacture a spurious rationale, why not have a day to celebrate ourselves as a United Kingdom, notwithstanding the fissures that have appeared in recent years.

The fact is that the term bank holiday is an anachronism since many of us conduct our financial affairs online and have not been inside a bank for years. The concept dates to the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 achieved through the legislative efforts of Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury.

A banker, scientist and social reformer, he was elected Liberal MP for Maidstone in 1870, and his Bank Holidays Act was integral to his efforts to ease the lot of “the most hardly worked classes of the community” (he was also responsible for limiting hours worked in shops). The measure created four Bank Holidays: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day.

This was the first time that statute had been used to guarantee secular days off and they became known as St Lubbock’s Days following a suggestion in this newspaper. In an editorial, we commented that people would “never forget him who gave them a new and universal day of repose and recreation”. Sadly, and despite the immortality predicted by the Telegraph leader writer, most people have forgotten him. Moreover, the logic behind our holidays is often hard to fathom.

In Merrie England, we used to have dozens of public holidays, a legacy of the saints’ days of the pre-reformation period. The Church of England listed 25 red-letter days – so called because they were printed in red in the calendar of the Book of Common Prayer. However, the carousing was curtailed by the Industrial Revolution and the Gradgrind insistence that employees should work until they dropped.

Even so, Sunday was always a day of rest and Christmas Day and Good Friday were both commonly acknowledged as holidays – but for most of the 19th century, Boxing Day, Easter Monday and Whit Monday were allowed only by generous masters.

The August bank holiday was originally the first Monday in the month when the weather was generally good. After an experiment between 1965 and 1970, it was moved to the last Monday, bringing it almost into autumn and causing many a summer fete to be washed out as a result. Edward Heath justified the shift “to alleviate the growing congestion at the peak of the holiday season”. At the same time, the government scrapped Whit Monday as a day off (because it is a moveable feast determined by the date of Easter) and replaced it with a fixed spring holiday on the last Monday in May.

The last holiday to be created was May Day in 1978. Although it had long been celebrated as a festival to mark the arrival of summer, the new holiday was unashamedly ideological, introduced by Labour as an expression of international workers’ solidarity.

The intention was that it should be held on May Day itself, although it was soon moved to the first Monday in May at the insistence of employers’ organisations.

The first holiday was a miserable wash-out, as Michael Wharton observed in his Way of the World column in this newspaper: “Boredom and depression oozed from earth and sky ... I hope Michael Foot, to whom we owe this glorious Festival of Labour, enjoyed it as he took his People’s Dog for a walk on Hampstead People’s Heath.’’

Indeed, so grateful were the trade unions that the following year they staged a series of strikes known as the Winter of Discontent, helping to bring down the Labour government and ushering in 18 years of Tory rule. So if Mr Johnson hopes to be the political beneficiary of a “Thank Holiday” he should ponder that.

Mind you, this is not an argument against holidays since we have a small number compared with other countries – Japan and Italy have 16, Spain and Portugal 14, Germany and Austria 13, Norway 12 and France 11. The UK has far fewer, with eight holidays in England and Wales, nine in Scotland and 10 in Northern Ireland. So another would not be an indulgence but it should be promulgated for the right reasons.

When he was prime minister, Gordon Brown fretted about establishing a British identity and proposed a United Kingdom Day, although nothing ever came of it. Among the suggestions was October 21, Trafalgar Day, but that was ruled out for fear of offending the French. Magna Carta could be celebrated as a national event, except it never applied in Scotland and the agreement was made in June, which does not solve the problem of too many spring holidays.

Why not turn May 1 into a National Day? It was the date in 1707 that the Acts of Union came into force and the United Kingdom of Great Britain came into being. We would just need to move the existing early May holiday from the first Monday back to May Day itself. Mr Johnson, when he became Prime Minister, also appointed himself Minister for the Union. He should mark his tenure by creating a UK National Day.

Does the public really want a day off loftily handed down as a reward for coping with a lockdown imposed by the Government?