We don’t need more bank holidays; they’re just an excuse for a day off – Neil McNicholas

Only for the fact that I was invited to write this column I wouldn’t even have remembered that it was a bank holiday – especially as I wasn’t planning to go to the bank today, it being a non-essential visit under the current lockdown rules.

I mention it also because last week Patricia Yates, the head of the national tourism agency Visit Britain, called for an additional bank holiday in October to make up for the loss of two bank holidays in May due to the lockdown.

Not surprisingly enquiring minds are asking: do we really need yet another bank holiday on our calendar?

My immediate answer would be that in order to have a bank holiday there have to be banks and, in recent years, they have become so rare on our high streets that they are almost extinct.

Also waiting to be served often feels as if the staff have gone on holiday already, bank holiday or not.

No one dares to complain in case they shut up shop as well and so we just stand there staring at our shoes and reflecting on the fact that we will never get these long and tedious minutes of our lives back again, and meanwhile fearing our families may be on the point of contacting the police to report us missing.

Prior to 1871 when statutory bank holidays were first introduced, there were in excess of 50 holidays on the calendar, some marking national events and commemorations, but the majority corresponding to all the many Christian festivals and saints’ days that used to be observed.

It may well have been the case that banks figure: why stay open on those days if everyone else was on holiday and therefore no one would be depositing or withdrawing money?

In 1871 the Bank Holiday Act established the dates of official bank holidays, and maybe in the reversal of that previous “chicken and egg” situation government offices, shops and businesses figured why stay open when there was nowhere to deposit their takings at the end of the day and so they might as well take a holiday as well.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask why, when banks are only open four and a half days a week – which these days is two and a half days days less than many businesses and shops, for example – do they then need to close on additional days when other businesses don’t get to do that.

There are currently seven such days: Good Friday, Easter Monday, early May (May Day), late May (Spring bank holiday), late Summer (August bank holiday), Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day, and now Ms Yates would like them to have yet another one in October, thank you very much.

I can understand Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday being holidays – as they should be for everyone – but what are those other days all about other than part of a “cunning plan” on the part of the banking industry.

Banks seem to have forgotten that they are making money from looking after our money, and giving us precious little in return.

In recent years we, their customers, seem to have increasingly become a bit 
of an inconvenience to them and they’d be quite happy if they didn’t have to 
deal with us at all – otherwise why are they closing branches, so making people have to travel to the next nearest town that still has one, or encouraging them to take their business and their money to some other bank that can still be bothered?

Why can you never speak on the phone to a bank manager any more who might even know your name? Why do ATMs seem to satisfy their definition of customer service despite the fact that not one of them can offer financial advice or make a decent cup of coffee? And now they are trying to get us to do all our banking online so they never have to deal with people face-to-face again.

It must be a tough job working four and a half days a week, and then getting a further week of bank holidays off each year, in addition to personal annual holidays.

And now Visit Britain would like them to have yet another day off because somehow that’s going to magically 
make up a £37bn shortfall in the revenue from tourism – presumably from all the money being spent by banking staff on holiday.

Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm.

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