a-holiday-whose-time-has-gone
The Mayday holiday on the first Monday of May has brought holiday fatigue to the middle of Spring. We've had Good Friday and Easter Monday, and the late May holiday, formerly Whit Monday, is this year on May 25th. This early May holiday was introduced by a Labour government to coincide with Labour Day in Socialist countries. (They celebrated it in the Spring, full of the promise of hoped-for achievement. The Americans celebrate it in September when the harvest is in and the achievement secure).
Meanwhile, the late August public holiday is on August 31st, leaving a gaping absence of days off until Christmas Day. The obvious way to ration them out is to move the superfluous and unsound Mayday holiday to somewhere in the middle of that gap. Trafalgar Day (October 21st) is an obvious candidate. We could have the holiday on the nearest Monday to it to give us another long weekend. It celebrates a great achievement for our nation, and one which secured its freedom until quite recently. As we struggle now to restore some of that lost freedom, the day and the holiday might strengthen our resolve, so that in later years we could celebrate that victory, too.
