Empire Windrush Day, Harvest Home and others

All people in England know that our public holidays are a mess. Half of them fall within about six weeks in Spring, there are large gaps in the calendar with no public holidays at all, and none specifically celebrate England and its people. I therefore propose a new set of public holidays, spread a little more evenly through the year, and all designed to celebrate more than just a day off for the banks. First, the holidays we should keep:

▸    Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. These bracket what is now the most important holiday of the year - the one week we all celebrate together. It is impossible to imagine life without this long break in the middle of the cold, dark and wet English winter.

▸    Good Friday and Easter Monday. Let’s keep these as well. They are a bit of a problem because Easter wanders about in a way that is incomprehensible even to the devoutest believers. In this century, Good Friday has varied between the 25th of March and the 18th of April. Still, this is a Christian country with an established church, and we should celebrate its most important holidays.

We should abolish the early Spring break, late Spring break and late August bank holidays, and replace them by these new holidays:

▸    Empire Windrush Day (22 June). This is named after the passenger liner which bought 492 Jamaicans to England in 1948. England has been a destination for immigrants for centuries, and the English are a mix of Gaels, Germans, Scandinavians, French, West Indians, South Asians and a lot more besides. We could choose any day to celebrate the mixing of people that has created the English, but the Empire Windrush is special because many West Indians see it as their Mayflower. So we should respect that.

▸    Harvest Home (Monday after second Sunday in September). This is traditional country celebration of the harvest, which has been adopted by the Church of England as the Harvest Festival and by North Americans as their thanksgiving holidays. The usual time for harvest home is near the Autumn equinox, but I have chosen a slightly earlier date to space out the public holidays better. Harvest Home should celebrate the productiveness of this land and the people who work in it.

▸    Remembrance Day (11 November). This day is widely celebrated in many countries in the World, but not in Britain. This is an insult to the memories of the 994,000 British people who died in the First World war, the 450,000 who died in the Second World War, and the many thousands who have died in other conflicts. We should celebrate their lives quietly, and think also of those who serve in the armed forces.

▸    Shakespeare Day and St George’s Day (23 April). This falls in Spring and in some years even coincides with Easter, but there is nothing I can do about that. This day should celebrate England as a nation which has made a massive contribution to civilisation, science, the arts, and good government. Shakespeare was our greatest poet and playwright: a man who used our language like no other. We should therefore celebrate him every year, as well as the creativity we share.