DID you spend yesterday celebrating the dignity of labour, marching to demonstrate solidarity or perhaps, harking back to earlier traditions, by dancing round a maypole on the village green? Possibly not.

At the next Bank Holiday weekend, which is only four weeks away, the majority will likewise fail to honour the feast of Pentecost.

In a fever of modernisation 30 years ago, this long weekend’s place in the calendar was in any case divorced from Whitsun, which was the original excuse.

The UK has fewer public holidays than other states but most have become counterproductive. May Day, which fell on May 3, is the newest, a crowd-pleasing gesture by a hard-pressed Labour Prime Minister to disillusioned left-wing supporters. By the time it started, it was obsolete.

Statutory Bank Holidays belong to the same tradition as the old northern wakes weeks. To give some relief and a little fun in the sun to toil-drained mill workers and Victorian counting house wage slaves, all businesses shut down at the same time. None could then gain a competitive advantage by staying open.

This tacit social contract lasted through many decades, while rising productivity and job market pressure made working conditions healthier and paid individual holidays the norm. Only vital services such as hospitals and power stations operated and we were regaled with pictures of heroic nurses labouring for our sake.

This compromise broke down as the god of competition overpainted the God of Easter, let alone quaint May Day customs. The moment one shop opens, others that stay shut lose business. All must follow suit.

Bank Holidays quickly turned into festivals of commerce, days of consumption. Communal activities and religious observance are marginalised. This year even Easter Day was no longer sacrosanct.

At the same time, mills and factories have given way to retail, service and leisure industries. The seven million now working in the distribution, hotels and restaurant sector are outnumbered only by those employed in public administration, education and health.

As a result, Bank Holidays now mock their original purpose. Up to a quarter of the UK’s 30 million working population will have been at work over the May Day weekend, in hospital wards, transport, communications and process industries, as well as in shops, petrol stations, clubs and hotels. And among those who did not have a day off were the majority of those who labour at the minimum wage and those who, in the old terms, are exploited.

Britain’s new class divide is between those who enjoy uninterrupted long weekends and those who have to satisfy their whims. It is the gap between bosses who repair to their yachts and the little people they have told to keep the business running and cope with the crowds while they are away; between the civil servants who frame policy in this area and the private sector workers who have to suffer the consequences; between investment bankers who push companies to maximise profits and frontline workers who find premiums for working Bank Holidays being pared away.

Lord Saatchi, supposedly on behalf of the Conservative Party, has finally exposed the absurdity of this corrupted policy relic by proposing a new Bank Holiday to celebrate a purely financial phenomenon. He wants everyone, including tax inspectors but excluding many of those on whom taxes bear hardest, to have a day off to mark “Tax Freedom” day.

This theoretical date, which is meant to mark the end of that fraction of the year that equates to the percentage national tax burden, is estimated to fall early in June. If a Conservative Chancellor managed to cut taxes, the date might move back a few days but no one would know because it would still be held on the nearest Monday.

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