FEW PEOPLE under 40 will recall the political resonance of the first May Day Bank Holiday, 28 years ago today. The dying Callaghan Government was certainly not trying to encourage morris dancing or give drunken Oxonians more time to recover from their leap off Magdalen Bridge. This was supposed to be International Labour Day, when doddery members of the Politburo would salute a carnival of tanks and missile launchers in Moscow and, so it was hoped, British trade unions would join their brothers and sisters all over the world in co-ordinated marches of solidarity.

If Jim Callaghan’s aim was to give oppressed workers a respite from their labours, it has been a miserable failure. With so many well-paid office workers and civil servants out enjoying themselves today the minions of our service-based economy — bar workers and DIY store cashiers — will be working all the harder. But I don’t suspect most of them will mind. Given the choice between the chance to earn some extra money and the opportunity to go on a solidarity march with my trade union, I know which I would choose. The common sense of the British worker in refusing to have anything to do with international socialism defeated the original purpose of the May Day Bank Holiday at its very inception in 1978.

Margaret Thatcher wanted to replace May Day Bank Holiday with “Trafalgar Day” in October; an idea mooted again in recent years as May 1 has become a magnet for anti- globalisation protesters. But to do so would amount to a pointless political gesture. Left as it is, the Bank Holiday serves as the perfect celebration of the defeat of communism, a day when many estate agents will be working dawn till dusk showing buyers around their properties and the tills at our garden centres will be ringing more loudly than on any other day of the year.

Just as the Church could not stop the pagans within us drinking and merrymaking when it hijacked the winter solstice and repackaged it as a festival celebrating the birth of Christ, socialists and anti-globalisers have made a pitiful failure of their attempt to seize May 1 — a day that, like Christmas, began as a time of pagan rejoicing. Unions in a dozen European cities are still trying to promote special events today, but as for us, we’ll be dancing around the maypole — then waltzing on down to B&Q.