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.