Give us more bank holidays!

May is the loveliest time of the year and as such it is a really good time to have a holiday.
Don’t take that away from us.

Something not to forget is that in this country we do not have a statutory right to paid leave on bank and public holidays. If employers give paid leave on bank or public holidays, this can count towards the minimum holiday entitlement. Some employers have indeed “done away” with bank and public holidays. They simply give their employees a certain number of days’ holiday to take per year and when the employees take them is up to them. Having a bank holiday in May or October or both or none won’t matter a hoot to them.

Otherwise I would tend to agree with Kate and Liz. May is such a lovely time of year, and I see the danger of a bank holiday in October instead of May tempting a lot of people to the Canaries to escape the autumn dreichness.

Just looked up in the diary – we have Easter Monday on 25th April then next Monday 2nd is May Day (is that Labour Day?) then Whitsun at the end of May. Ridiculous – Make May Day into October Day when we need to be cheered up to face the onset of winter with no break now from August to Christmas

Bank holidays are a nuisance, the roads are choked with traffic and everywhere is so crowded, I wonder why people are so keen on them.

For heavens sake just get on with it and move the May holiday to October. August to Xmas is a long haul, whilst there are so many holidays in April/May that its a nightmare for businesses, particularly small ones, to achieve any sense of continuity.

I can’t believe these people are giving arguments to have one or the other. Let’s have both

May Day is one of our oldest and richest native traditions. Proposing to dismantle our cultural heritage in the name of tourism is a very odd idea indeed. To see a sample of the many colourful traditions associated with May Day (with loads of photos), please visit: http://www.facebook.com/savemayday

The only reason for the Tory’s wanting this day moved is their misguided obsession with it’s supposed connection to Communist celebrations. They are wrong about this as in everything else in there little minds. You notice how he never said, ‘we need an extra day because we don’t get as many as we should’.

Instead of moving the May Day holiday to the Autumn how about giving all workers one extra day of leave so they can take it when they want?

I’m Campaign Organiser for the St George Unofficial Bank Holiday (www.stgeorgesholiday.com), and the full proposal from the government is to replace May Day bank holiday with either St George’s Day or a UK/Trafalgar Day in October.

We have always supported the idea of an EXTRA bank holiday on 23 April (St George’s Day). We are not in favour of the government proposal to move May Day, as we see this as the traditional day of Spring celebration for Morris Dancers (a big part of English culture).

In addition, England has fewer bank holidays than all the big European countries so an additional day would bring us closer to equality.

Our view on Trafalgar Day is that it would be a British celebration, not English; therefore we do not support it. In addition the press would have a great time digging all the skeleton’s out of Lord Nelson’s cupboard each year – he was having an affair with a married woman, we slaughtered French and Spanish sailors (not very EU friendly), sailors were regularly flogged under his command and he opposed the abolition of the slave trade. Has anyone in government thought this through?

We also forsee problems in getting the full backing of the government and people of Scotland for a UK celebration, particularly in view of the resounding success recently of the SNP and their commitment to a referendum on independence. Plus we cannot imagine many Union Jacks being waved by Irish catholics in the Falls Road.

In truth, any ‘British’ celebration would only serve to highlight how the Union is disunited. Ask a Scotsman his nationality and he will say “Scottish”, ask a Welshman and he will say “Welsh” – only the English refer to themselves as British. Britain used to be a club with four members, now it has only one – England.

Over the country as a whole, October is the wettest month of the year, and the second half of the month is the wetter half. A public holiday at that time makes no sense.

If the spring holidays seem too closely bunched together, why not consider moving the LATE May holiday into June? We do this anyway each time there is a royal jubilee (it’s being moved into June next year), so why can’t it be in June every year? The late May holiday has no meaning in any case: it is not Whitsun, as many people still think it is – Whit Monday was scrapped in the 1960s and replaced with the meaningless Spring Bank Holiday. (Whitsun falls seven weeks after Easter, so this year it is on June 12th!) May Day, on the other hand, does have a meaning and is part of our history.