May Day, VE Day - or Both?

Trafalgar Square, London, 8 May 1945

Should Scotland join in with the 2020 May Bank Holiday?

The May Bank Holiday for 2020 is to be moved to Friday, 8 May, to coincide with the 75^th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day, marking the end of World War II in Europe, which was officially marked as 8 May 1945.  The Friday holiday shall mark a weekend of celebrations, but in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland only.  The question is should Scotland similarly move the holiday to 8 May?

There are a few sides to this, and do excuse me if I view this move with a certain amount of cynicism.

Holidays on or around the 1 May have long been associated with International Worker’s Day, which was instituted by the 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, for all workers to recognise 1 May as a day for workers.  It is due to this that the political right, particularly among pro-capitalist interests, have often sought to take the May Bank Holiday away from people, seeing it as a socialist or communist holiday.  Indeed, there are modern socialists connotations to ‘May Day’, but the facts surrounding it are much more convoluted, and go back much further than socialism and / or any workers movement was ever thought of.

So let’s look at the history.  For a start, International Worker’s Day, which was always meant to be 1 May, no matter which day that fell upon, does not even reflect the history behind it.  The Second International chose 1 May as the closest day to the 1886 Haymarket Event.  Striking workers and their supporters in Chicago’s Haymarket were holding a peaceful protest, but were surrounded by police.  At some point an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb into the police ranks, and the police responded by opening fire upon the crowds.  The result was 4 deaths among the public, and 7 police deaths.  However, this occurred upon 4 May 1886, not 1 May.

Traditional May holidays go back much, much further, and their origins are in fact lost in the mists of time.  May Day was Beltane, the welcoming of summer in the Celtic calendar, which was reserved for the blessing of beasts and marked with fertility rituals.   This is where we get the Maypole from; far from being an innocent and charming dance of girls with garlands around it, the Maypole is in fact a symbolic phallus, which virgin girls would originally ‘bless’ by dancing around it naked.  The night before Beltane, 30 April, would be marked with celebrations of fire festivals across Scotland, Ireland, and parts of England and Wales.  Tarbolton, in Ayrshire, Scotland, takes its name from “Tor Beltane”, and this remembers the time when cattle were driven between two blazing pyres on Hood’s Hill.  The pyres marking the coming of summer were traditionally lit at the stroke of midnight.  This was usually followed by a great deal of cavorting and drinking, which of course would have left no one in any fit state to work on 1 May.  So it was that 1 May came to be the chosen day for local communities to hold their local fairs or galas, and as time went on, the personage of the Summer Queen, who would light the pyres on Beltane, evolved into the May Queen, where a young girl from each community was chosen to be queen for a year.  This choice of 1 May for galas was especially strong among mining communities, who chose it as their day.  So again, we see that long before socialist labour movements, May Day was already established as a worker’s holiday, and this inevitably led to the first backlashes from capitalist interests to crush it.

In more modern times, Conservative governments in the UK have continually tried to put down May Day, but with little success.  The closest that they have got is to agree that the first Monday in May be a Bank Holiday.  But even this they have done grudgingly.

Besides this history, we however have to consider the importance of VE Day, which is indeed important, and cannot and must not be ignored.  The final defeat of the Nazi scourge across Europe was a massive event not just in UK history, not just in European history, but also in world history.  70 to 85 million people died in World War II in Europe, including of course approximately 16 million who were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, not to mention those who killed where they stood purely because they did not match the hateful ideology of Nazi purity.  Axis forces actually got as far as the Channel Islands, and the UK should and must always remember just how close we came to invasion and defeat.  There are many alive today, myself included owe not just their freedom, but also their very existence to the victory of the Allied forces.  And of course, it was also important for Germany, to free them from the tyranny they had suffered too long.  The importance of VE Day simply cannot be underestimated.

Yet against this, I still have my reservations.  Admittedly I am a pacifist and anti-militarist, so I have to admit not being at all fond of demonstrations of militarism, jingoism, hyper-patriotism, and people playing ‘patriotic one-upmanship’, of trying to show how they are more loyal (and supposedly then better) than the next person.  All that makes me sick to the very pit of my stomach.

In the UK we already have a number of days when past wars are remembered, and are usually marked with such demonstrations; be they Trafalgar Day, Remembrance Day, or Armed Forces Day.  The latter of these actually started out by the wives and families of serving or veteran men and women in the UK armed forces.  However it has since become hijacked by politicians for their own nefarious purposes.  Just one example was Armed Forces Day 2014, which took place in Stirling – just one week after the 700^th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn took place in the same city.  This was also of course the same year that the independence on Scottish Independence would take place, and while others may not see it this way, the message to me was all too clear, as to who was in charge, and they were not willing to listen to any other viewpoint.  At the least, placing Armed Forces Day in Stirling in 2014 was a propagandist move by the Westminster government in my opinion.  And that is actually disgusting; for far from respecting the armed forces and remembering war dead, it was an underhand political move.

I also question other motives behind military parades.  How can we point the finger at regimes like China and North Korea for displays of military might, surrounded by unquestioning, flag-waving patriots, when we actually do exactly the same in the UK?  And then of course, there are the politicians who are always quick to jump in and hijack such displays for personal and / or political motives.  I speak here of course about the politicians who make sanctimonious speeches about ‘gallant sacrifice’ – and then return to their jobs where they starve the armed forces of the resources they need, strip veterans of benefits, and completely ignore the many veterans sleeping on the streets.  They hypocrisy of such makes my blood boil. Take note, serving men and women and veterans; my argument is not with you, but with the bastards who send you to war, only to dump you on the scrap heap afterwards.

I am also turned off military commemorations by some of the people they attract, who are only too willing to use them for their own reasons; I refer of course to those on the extreme right of politics.  Go and look at any far right social media page, and you will find it festooned with poppies, Union Flags, and messages stating that those who fell did so for “our way of life”.  The sickening part of course being that those who fought in World War II did so to make the world safe from precisely their sort of twisted ideology.  But then, when you see pictures of the followers of such standing in front of a war memorial, holding a Union Flag (usually upside-down) – wearing Nazi regalia, and making Nazi salutes.  Such people, who must be sharing their family brain cells, do anything but honour the fallen and remember the importance of freeing Europe from the Nazi scourge; they completely dishonour both, and they do so to push their own neo-Nazi ideology.  If there are earth tremors every 8 May, it is millions of WWII dead whirling violently in their graves.

So, should Scotland follow suit with having the 2020 May Bank Holiday on 8 May, to tie in with VE Day?  I don’t honestly know.  I can see both sides of it, and far be it from me to ever dishonour those to whom I owe thanks for being born.  Yet as far as I can see, today’s Tory government have achieved what Margaret Thatcher failed to do; taking May Day away from ordinary working people, as their one day in the year to celebrate their commonality.  And in doing so, I already foresee a load of militaristic, jingoistic guff about something which should always be remembered, but never celebrated, as there are no winners in any war – only losers.  And one that will, as usual be hijacked by politicians and the extreme right for their own personal and propaganda purposes.

There is of course, another answer; the Friday before May Day 2020 falls upon 1 May.  I see absolutely no reason why we cannot have two consecutive May holidays.

When Will Unionists Take Ownership of Their Behaviour?

Unionist snatching flags

Does someone have to die before anyone takes notice?

An All Under One Banner (AUOB) march for Scottish Independence took place in the Borders town of Galashiels on Saturday, 1 June 2019.  Sadly, I could not be there, but the marchers were blessed with a sunny day, and there was apparent good cheer as approximately 5000 people took part.

But the day was almost seriously marred by the actions of a few unionists, including one incident that could very easily have ended in a serious, possibly even fatal accident.

As the Yes Bikers, a motorcycle group of independence supporters, approached Galashiels, they encountered a line of screws deliberately laid out across the road, on the A68 near Earlston.  Some of the bikes suffered punctures, but the bikers, some of whom were carrying children, managed to get through.  Only one bike was stopped.

This follows on from incidents in at the Glasgow AUOB March in Glasgow in May, where Yes Bikers had traffic cones and other objects thrown at them, and one person standing in the middle of the road was trying to snatch flags from the backs of bikes, which could have resulted in bikes being toppled, or the man responsible being injured in a collision.  Another unionist stood in traffic, removed his trousers and underpants, and slapped his buttocks towards the bikers.  Thankfully, both these individuals were arrested.

While the mainstream media is quick to jump on and sensationalise minor wrongdoings by a tiny minority within the Independence movement, such as alleged abusive comments on social media by “cybernats” (many of which are not actually abusive), there is a violent element within the unionist camp which is rarely reported, if it does warrants a small column inside a newspaper and has never been front page news, and which the unionist camp never seem to condemn nor take ownership for.

Incidents by unionists since 2014 have included;

• An 80-year-old Yes supporter knocked to the ground, breaking his arm, by a woman who was a member of both the Labour Party and Better Together.
• A 5-year-old boy narrowly missed when a unionist pushed a chair out of an upper storey window, aiming to hit a Yes stall, and former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars.
• A pregnant homeless woman kicked in the stomach by a Better Together speaker, who had links to the extreme-right British National Party.
• A Yes stallholder headbutted by one man, while two other men overturned his stall.
• Yes/SNP campaigners being verbally abused, threatened, and even spat upon – myself included – in public.
• Several Yes cafes and hubs being vandalised, some with their stock destroyed.
• Excrement smeared on the door handles of Penicuik Yes Café.
• Peaceful independence supporters, despite being defeated in the 2014 referendum, being beaten up by gangs of unionist thugs in Glasgow’s George Square.
• Cars with Yes / SNP stickers being keyed, and / or their windows smashed.
• Houses displaying Yes / SNP stickers or logos, or flying the Saltire, having them vandalised, and in some cases their windows broken.
• An elderly man in Edinburgh South Yes Hub recently having a bottle of water thrown at him; not over him, the actual plastic bottle was deliberately aimed at his head.

 In every single one of these incidents, nobody from any of the unionist organisations, and no high-profile individuals within the unionist movement have spoken out to condemn them.  Quite the opposite, whenever they have happened there have been unionists congratulating the perpetrators, and some saying they wish it had been worse.

I am not saying for one moment that everybody in the independence movement is an angel.  Far from it, every political movement has its hotheads and dangerous elements.  The big difference is that whenever anyone in the independence movement has done something really wrong, the vast majority of us have condemned their actions, and they very quickly find themselves ostracised by most within the movement.  This is precisely what happened when Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson was subjected to a tirade of homophobic abuse by one individual using a false name on Twitter.  Within 24 hours the said individual had his identity made public, was suspended from Yes Scotland and the SNP, and was shamed into phoning Ruth Davidson to apologise.  Ruth later Tweeted “I feel I have been treated with chivalry.”  She is welcome.  No one in this movement believes in playing the man and no’ the ball.

But there are unionists who persist in abusive and increasingly violent actions, and nothing is said or done about that.

I am not for one moment castigating all unionists as violent and abusive.  I happen to know for a fact that the vast majority are not, but most are capable of reasoned debate, or who at the least will walk away from the argument.  But at the same time, the unionist movement are not taking ownership of those within their movement who are now presenting a danger to life and limb.

And notice my language here; “taking ownership”.  For make no mistake about it, unionists, you own these actions, and by ignoring them, or claiming it’s nothing to do with you, you merely bring dishonour to your own movement.  At the worst, you are risking a serious incident where someone could be seriously hurt, or even killed.

What will it take for you to take responsibility, unionists?  A death?

In the spirit of democratic and reasoned political debate, I sincerely hope not.