France is ditching bank holidays and so should we

Telegraph

2 days ago

Our Gallic neighbours have instructed us in the ways of many things. I'm thinking particularly of white Burgundy, champagne, béchamel sauce, mistresses and surrendering.
More recently the UK's political leadership has taken on President Macron's habit of hugging everyone. Thus Sir Keir Starmer can't see the likes of President Zelensky across a crowded room without clambering over a sea of suits to give the guy a hug. And last week Sir Keir was with Europe's great hugger-in-chief and thus enveloping 47-year-old Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric in his arms.
But here's another thing: as bold as Dijon mustard, as sensible as the line judges at Roland-Garros and as perky as garlic, it has just been announced by the French Prime Minister François Bayrou. He's ditching two bank holidays.
'The entire nation has to work more,' he said this week, adding, 'so that the activity of the country as a whole increases and so that France's situation improves.'
Bayrou's plan comes as he attempts to lower the country's spiralling public deficit and debt and, in next year's budget, save €43.8 billion. His plan is, he says, the 'last stop before the cliff edge'.
And sounding more like Idi Amin, the Ugandan president of the 1970s, than a centrist European politician of the 2020s, he is insistent that, 'everyone will have to contribute to the effort'.
The immediate practical problem, aside from the cacophony that is the sound of 68 million grumbling frogs, is which days to scrap. France has 11 national holidays and Bayrou has suggested scrapping Easter Monday (fair enough in a nation of croissant-munching atheists – only 5 per cent attend Mass on Sundays) and May 8, which is Victory Day. The latter should logically be renamed Surrender Day, occurs on June 22 (the date in 1940 of the Armistice) and on which the nation should definitely be put to work.
The plan may sound harsh, particularly for a people famed for their love of leisure – most people take a month off in summer, they must work a maximum of 35 hours a week, lunch for a minimum of an hour and can dwell over a coffee long after it has gone cold. And indeed politicians, left and right, were spitting out their vins de table in rages this week.
'[It's] a direct attack on our history, our roots and on working France,' said Jordan Bardella of the far-Right National Rally. Fabien Roussel of the French Communist party described it as 'an organised hold-up'.
But hang on, it's actually a fabulous idea. And one that we should embrace as firmly as a Starmer/Macron hug.
The UK has eight bank holidays. There's Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday and then a load of early summer ones that charge at you out of the blue normally when a heatwave has come and gone and it starts to rain and a random one at the end of August that enables people at the tail end of the Notting Hill Carnival to smoke cannabis in the street without impunity before a few stabbings at dusk.
And they are now – in concept and practice – out of date and a contributor to national decline. And, before you squeal about the idea of my tearing apart a cornerstone of Britain's cultural history, they are relatively new. It was 1871 that an Act of Parliament was passed officially designating a number of days that workers should have off and on which banks would be closed. The man behind the Bank Holidays Act was the liberal reforming MP Sir John Lubbock who believed that religious holidays should be formalised. There was otherwise no way to ensure that a factory worker wasn't forced to toil, in gruelling conditions, for six days a week.
The 'St Lubbock's Days', as they were called for a while, reflected the shift in Victorian England to more formalised leisure. But that was then. More than 150 years later and Britain dwells in a state of lugubrious idleness at which Lubbock himself would raise an eyebrow.
Indeed post-Covid, most of the UK enjoys a four-day jolly every weekend. Offices are lucky if workers deign to join them Tuesday to Thursday and they can only tempt them in by offering free cereal, table tennis, comfy sofas in so many break-out areas, a drinks trolley on a Thursday afternoon (non-alcs catered for so as not to offend the Gen Zs) and a promise not to send the poor lambs too many emails on a Monday or Friday. Because the end of the week is firmly the beginning of the weekend and Monday is a recovery day and who wants to get on a horrid train when you can Zoom from home in your jim-jams.
Our work patterns are also considerably less Victorian. Almost 7.5 million people now freelance – full- or part-time – and bank holidays lurk around the corner for them as pestilent days of childcare and lost revenue.
Each bank holiday costs the nation some £2.4 billion in economic output so while politicians publicly support occasional additions such as that for King Charles's coronation in 2023, privately they shudder at the damage it does to the nation's books.
And they are patently not 'bank' holidays of course, because nowadays you can bank online 24 hours a day. Furthermore, most high street banks are now upscale bars and people only wander into the remaining banks by mistake when they're drunk.
Bank holidays are no longer precious, quiet days, and they are conspicuously not religious. The only notable religion featuring being that of unabashed consumerism.
That France is enacting this policy while, according to the Office for National Statistics, actually being more productive than us should shame us into working more. So let's scrap two of them, the random May one and the August one, the extra days worked can merit a proportionate pay rise and hospitality need not grumble because, with more money in one's pocket, we can all afford to nip to the pub after work.