Britain has many quaint bank holiday rituals, such as sitting in motorway traffic jams or stubbornly lying on the beach when the wind-chill is close to freezing. One of the more understandable is pointing out how few days off we have compared with many other countries and calling to have more of them. I beg to differ. We shouldn’t have more bank holidays, we should abolish them altogether.
Bank holidays are a British idiosyncrasy that some former members of our empire continue to honour. Other countries don’t have more of them, they have public holidays instead. This is not a matter of mere terminology. A public holiday is a shared civic commemoration of something important for the society that celebrates it. These include Bastille Day in France, Liberation Day in Italy and Waitangi Day in New Zealand, which commemorates the signing of the nation’s founding treaty by the British Crown and Māori chiefs.
Even in America, where there is no legal right to any days off work, many employers observe Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Independence Day and Martin Luther King Day. These all remind citizens of some of the important people and moments in their history, helping to forge a shared identity. In the UK, apart from Christmas and Easter, our bank holidays celebrate nothing at all. For example, last Tuesday most countries in the world celebrated International Workers’ Day. We just worked. Today’s early May bank holiday is supposed to be a surrogate but it has never been widely seen as a special day for working people.
Chosen wisely, public holidays could do important civic work. For decades politicians have been wringing their hands about the failure to create a clear sense of Britishness and Englishness. They might have noticed that the only national day officially celebrated in the UK is St Andrew’s Day in Scotland. Why not give Northern Ireland, England and Wales their own national holidays as well as creating another for the whole of the United Kingdom? Allowing regions to have their own public holidays could help to foster local identities and boost civic pride. Some will be more enthusiastically embraced than others: I imagine Manchester Day would be a huge party. Kent Day would get people thinking more about what they love about the garden of England.
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The national conversation about which days to celebrate would itself provoke a valuable civic conversation. Many would champion International Women’s Day. A better option might be a day for equal rights which could honour all historically disadvantaged groups. As well as being a reminder of the work that still has to be done, it would hopefully over time become more of a celebration of what has been achieved.
Adding non-Christian holidays to Christmas and Easter is tempting but impractical. The way to recognise all faiths and none is to give every citizen the right to take one or two days off a year for occasions of personal significance, no questions asked. A Jew could choose Passover, a Hindu Diwali, a Muslim Eid, a Sikh the birthday of Guru Nanak, and an atheist the anniversary of the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Of course the creation of these holidays would run the risk of being politicised. But a non-partisan commission could be charged with making the decisions, ensuring our new national holidays are unifying, not divisive.
The right to paid leave should be part of the change from bank to public holidays. At the moment, workers have an annual entitlement of 5.6 weeks but no right to insist on taking it on bank holidays. Making time off mandatory for public holidays would reinforce their civic significance. If that means fewer shops open, depriving many of their preferred bank holiday entertainment, so be it. If they had something real to celebrate they might be less inclined to spend the day shopping anyway.
The final change should be an end to the rule that makes all public holidays except Christmas and Good Friday fall on a Monday. This is part and parcel of the crudely utilitarian ethos of bank holidays, which are designed begrudgingly to ensure that if we must take time off it should interfere as little as possible with the usual routines of production and commerce.
Other nations are more relaxed. In a lot of countries, when a holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday many take the day between it and the weekend off. In France, Italy, Portugal and Spain this is called “making the bridge”, in Sweden it’s a “squeeze day”, while in Chile they “take the sandwich”. If a day is truly important it should be celebrated whenever it falls. Taking time off seriously would challenge the Protestant work ethic assumption that we live to work, signalling that as a nation we believe that we work to live.
• Julian Baggini is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy, including A Short History of Truth (Quercus). He also runs the website Microphilosophy